In this chapter will be discussed the other South
Kensington—not the feet-aching museums
and the great buildings devoted to the pursuit
of art, music and science but the hardly less forbidding
residential area lying mainly to the west
and south. (fn. 1) It is a territory of very big houses now
for the most part transformed, one senses somewhat
against their will, from the homes of single
wealthy families to flats, apartments and hotels.
The area under discussion extends clockwise from
Princes Gate Mews to the top of Queen's Gate.
Here some 670 houses were built of which
almost 600 were raised on the four estates of the
Earls of Harrington (some 232), the Alexander
family (some 161), the Commissioners for the
Exhibition of 1851 (some 156), and the Trustees
of Mills' Charity (some 48): additionally some
480 coach-houses or stables were built in mews,
with living accommodation above. The detached
area developed in rather special circumstances by a
building firm in Palace Gate is chiefly discussed in
Chapter III and despite its relevance the greater
part of the east side of Exhibition Road has had to
be excluded from detailed examination in this
volume as essentially part of the development of
Princes Gate in Knightsbridge.

Most of the area consists of terraces built
between 1855 and the early 1880's in a variety of
more-or-less Classical styles, their street fronts
faced either wholly in stucco or in grey gault
bricks with extensive stucco dressings. Some
individual houses and block of flats were erected
after 1870 in the modes of the red-brick domestic
revival and its aftermath but these were predominantly
towards the northern part of the area
where many demolitions have since occurred and
visually the area is still dominated by the older
form of terrace house. Overwhelmingly the impression
is of a prevailing Italianate manner
(Plates 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92).

This was the creation of a comparatively small
number of builders, all with some BelgraviaPimlico
background and doubtless very much
aware of one another's work. Their operations
were on a fairly large scale. Within this area the
firm of Charles Aldin, for example, built more
than 200 houses, William Douglas at least 108,
(Sir) Charles Freake at least 91 and William
Jackson at least 79. All four (and others) worked—usually as building lessee—on more than one of
the freehold estates: Charles Aldin and his
successors worked on at least three.

The role of the estate surveyors is difficult to
assess. They did not stamp a clearly distinctive
character on any of the estates (one comparatively
minor differentiation being noticed, however,
on pages 310–11). When they collaborated,
as they must have done in some aspects of the
development, the documents do not reveal the
details or show how far they went. Some architects'
names occur, but for much of the area it is
impossible to state the architect certainly or to
know whether the presence of certain features is
evidence of the direct employment of a particular
architect or of a builder's exploitation of a
successful motif. Charles Aldin's firm was especially
inclined to use some of its various
house-designs indifferently on more than one
estate, and also seems to have employed watereddown
versions of architects' designs in the
neighbourhood.

Intensely Victorian as it is, this area still shows
essentially the Georgian practice of building
terraces of largely identical houses for the rich.
Inside the houses their planning preserved much
of Georgian practice. The street layout is largescaled
and severely rectilinear.

Today the mews at the back are at least as
much favoured for residence as the now subdivided
houses, and are in some ways pleasanter
and quieter (Plate 83c). Formerly they must have
been livelier than the streets, and at certain times
of day a noisy hustle of activity as the carriages
were brought out. Their provision and location
doubtless occupied much of the developers'
thoughts but no record of this has been found.
The overall ratio of mews-units to houses seems
(on the basis of a count from the 1895 Ordnance
Survey map) to have been about 1 to 1.4. In the
'best' residential parts the numbers probably
approached equality: on the 1851 Commissioners'
estate the numbers were approximately 148 and
156.

Antecedents

The place of the Great Exhibition in the impulses
that led to this estate-development was widely
acknowledged at the time and the ambitions of
Prince Albert and his Exhibition Commissioners
for the central part of the estate they acquired in
c. 1852–3 came to be important for surrounding
owners. But essentially the development was not
initiated by the Great Exhibition or its Commissioners'
subsequent activities. In the years
immediately before 1851 biggish—sometimes
very big—houses for the rich were appearing all
around the area under discussion. Thurloe
Square, Onslow Square, Hereford Square, Hyde
Park Gate and (most recently) Kensington Gate
had already been built or begun. So too—and
perhaps most significantly of all in terms of the
house-type involved—had two stretches of Princes
Gate looking across the Kensington Road to
Hyde Park. In some of these developments names
occur that are met later. In Thurloe Square the
Alexander family were the developers and freeholders,
and in Onslow Square C. J. Freake was
the building lessee. In the summer of the Great
Exhibition the latter was already negotiating for
further important pieces of land—Mary Plummer's
estate and, in the area under discussion, the
big block of land then owned by Baron Villars
(figs. 1, 18 on pages 2, 53). The intentions of the
Prince can hardly have been widely known but in
August a Royal Commission's recommendation
of the south side of the Kensington Road to the
Government as a site for the National Gallery was
made public. The actual negotiations of the
Government and, later, of the 1851 Commissioners
for land seem to have been successfully
kept secret, but they were, of course, not wholly
secret to the builders and entrepreneurs like John
Kelk and Freake himself who were employed as
agents, and it is difficult to judge how far, from
August 1851 onwards, knowledge of these
enquiries may have leaked out more widely.
But in any event no elaborate explanation is
needed for the interest of estate developers in this
area.

Building in fact proceeded roughly at the same
time on the three main estates (and approximately
in step with the completion and extension of
Princes Gate down the east side of Exhibition
Road). The story seems to be best told in terms of
builders rather than estate owners. But by a small
margin it was the estate of the Earl of Harrington
that was the first to move, and that estate's
architect, C. J. Richardson, was the designer of
the first houses to be built. Thereafter he gave
something of his own rather fluid artistic personality
to the subsequent developments, and in
1870 a local newspaper went so far as to call him
'the Architect of independent [that is, nonofficial]
South Kensington'. (fn. 18) He was an architect
with a great interest in such matters as the design
of stoves and chimney-flues to control the
emission of smoke, and claimed that houses of his
in Queen's Gate needed none of the 'tallboys' or
cowls that disfigured most London chimneypots. (fn. 19)
His other enthusiasm, for the domestic architecture
of Old England, was repressed on his streetfronts
but sometimes broke out in his interior
confections here.

The first building agreement: Lord
Harrington and William Jackson

The fifth Earl of Harrington had succeeded to
the title in March 1851, and in September the
partition of the estate with Baron Villars was
finally concluded (see page 7). In the first half
of 1852 there were indirect approaches to Lord
Harrington from the 1851 Commissioners
through Freake for the purchase of part of his
property here, but Lord Harrington's advisers
were, or affected to be, unwilling for him to sell
(see page 56), and in June 1852 Lord Harrington
forestalled the Commissioners by concluding a
building agreement for his whole forty-six acres
with an individual entrepreneur.

This was William Jackson, a 36-year-old
builder born in Ireland. He had a business address
in Parliament Street, Westminster, (fn. 20) but
had bought a house at Isleworth, Worton Hall,
in 1850, for £1,700. (fn. 21) His brother Thomas was a
railway contractor with a .substantial builder's
business in Pimlico, (fn. 22) and William soon acquired
a wharf there too, (fn. 23) being described as 'of Pimlico'
in 1854–60. (fn. 24) By 1861, however, he had a workshop
and yard covering some one and a half acres
at what is now the northern corner of Stanhope
Gardens and Gloucester Road. (fn. 25)

Jackson's brother Thomas joined with the big
contractor (Sir) Samuel Morton Peto in a bond
for £10,000 to guarantee William's performance
of his contract. (fn. 20) By this, Jackson was to build
three hundred houses within nine years, a third
of them first class to the value of at least £1,000
each and the remainder of at least £700 in value
(much lower, in fact, than the value of the houses
which were actually erected under the agreement).
The ground rent was to be £1,200 in the
first year, rising to £4,600 (or £100 per acre) in
the tenth and subsequent years. Leases from the
Earl to Jackson or his nominees were to be for
ninety-nine years from 24 June 1852, and before
any lease was granted four houses were always to
be completed in carcase, or two completely fitted
out.

By March 1853, however, an agreement had
been reached (but not concluded until November
1858) for the sale of seventeen acres to the 1851
Commissioners, who were also to give Jackson
nearly £8,000 in compensation for the loss of that
much building land. A sale to Brompton Hospital
of land outside the area of this volume further
reduced the area in the Earl's ownership to about
twenty-five acres, in three separate pieces. The
contract of 1852 was therefore modified. The
number of houses to be built was reduced to 163,
of which 55 were to be first class, and the time
limit extended to 1867, but the ultimate ground
rent of a little over £2,500 still corresponded to
£100 per acre. (fn. 26)

The other estates

Meanwhile the 1851 Commissioners had been
assembling the other constituent parts of their
estate by purchase or exchange. Their intentions
here were declared in their Second Report of
November 1852, and the establishment of the
main outlines of their property more or less concluded
by the agreement with the Earl and
Jackson in March 1853. The main roads were
begun under the direction of the Commissioners'
adviser, Thomas Cubitt, in 1854. The Earl's
architect, Richardson, later claimed to have
helped Cubitt with the layout. (fn. 27) Jackson seems
to have done the work in Queen's Gate and
Cromwell Road at least, and probably also in
Queen's Gate Terrace, partly in his capacity as
adjacent building owner. Cromwell Road was
open by September 1855. (fn. 28)

On the south side of that road and on the west
side of Queen's Gate lay the third major estate.
Its owner, H. B. Alexander, a solicitor, was fully
alerted to its potentialities, not only by his family's
recent practice nearby but by the approaches made
to him on behalf of the 1851 Commissioners from
1852 onwards. As their secretary commented,
'There can be no doubt that Mr. Alexander is a
very shrewd lawyer, and quite understands the
real value of his property'. (fn. 29)

Virtually nothing appears in the records of the
three main estates so far as they have been
examined to throw light on the detailed discussions
that must have accompanied the precise determination
of the lines of the chief roads and the
exchanges of pieces of property that were made
by the Inclosure Commissioners to facilitate these
arrangements. Lord Harrington's representative
would have been Richardson. Jackson had his
own surveyor, (Sir) Henry Hunt, who succeeded
J. W. Higgins as the 1851 Commissioners'
surveyor also early in 1854, although Thomas
Cubitt was the important figure here until his
death in 1855. Alexander's surveyor was George
Pownall of Wigg and Pownall, who had also
acted for Baron Villars before the latter sold out
to the Commissioners, and produced for him a
suggested layout of conventional 'squares' in
1852. (fn. 30) (Pownall also acted for Freake.) Perhaps
Hunt and Pownall were personally acquainted:
at any rate, Hunt's son married Pownall's
daughter. (fn. 31) As will be seen, there is a suggestion
in the records that Richardson proposed the layout
west of Queen's Gate on the Alexander as well
as the Harrington estate. If so, the indication
seems to be that the formidable master of the
adjacent Commissioners' estate, Prince Albert,
was not appraised of it until building had begun
(see page 275). But the reality behind all this is
obscure.

In 1855, with the roads being completed,
house-building began, on the Harrington estate.

William Jackson in Queen's Gate
and Hyde Park Gate: the
Harrington estate

Jackson began on the west side of Queen's Gate
near its northern end with a terrace of houses
designed by C. J. Richardson, who showed a view
of them, 'now being erected', at the Royal
Academy in 1855. (fn. 32) No trace appears of the
quasi-Tudor attributes Richardson had given to
Lord Harrington's own new house in Kensington
Palace Gardens, but an elaborate 'classical'
frontispiece adorned each house (fig. 63 on page
309). These were sufficiently completed to be
leased individually to Jackson by the Earl from
July 1856 onwards. (fn. 33) By November 1856 they
were given their first puff by The Land and
Building News, (fn. 34) a periodical that, as The Building
News, henceforward carried under the guise of
reportage a good deal of propaganda for Jackson's,
Aldin's and Freake's houses hereabouts.

Originally the terrace design was to embrace
only fifteen houses, the present Nos. 5–19
(consec.) Queen's Gate, and Richardson fitted
them up with a central accent by linking the
porches of Nos. 11–13 in a colonnade. But the
terraces of this part of South Kensington abound
in symmetrical compositions that have miscarried,
or lost such value as they ever had by changes of
plan, and here the sequence of houses was by
spring 1857 being extended to the present Nos.
1–4. (fn. 35) In March of that year a tempting lithographic
view of Queen's Gate and its new houses
from Hyde Park was prepared (no doubt based
on the Royal Academy exhibit of 1855), and was
submitted by Jackson for approval by Prince
Albert (Plate 82a), Being, with Freake's houses
on the east side of Exhibition Road, the first to be
newly built looking on to the Commissioners'
main rectangle their character was important to
that body. Fortunately, as the Prince's secretary,
Charles Grey, said, 'there can be no doubt that
these handsome buildings will assist the Commissioners'
views materially'. (fn. 36)

Of five tall storeys over a basement, the houses
are twenty-five or twenty-eight feet wide. The
average depth of each plot is eighty feet, almost
entirely occupied at ground level by rooms—originally described as dining-room, breakfastroom
and 'gentleman's business room'—that left
little space for a yard or area (fig. 44). (fn. 37) In some of
the houses the service area on the ground floor
was carefully screened-off. There were nine bedrooms
and the first floor was largely taken up
with a grand double drawing-room separated into
front and back parts by an elliptical arch, and with
a total length of fifty-seven feet. (fn. 38) At the rear,
between the ground and first floors, was a conservatory,
so common in South Kensington,
'lighted by a curved roof entirely of glass, and its
sides glazed with glass in diaper pattern, having
amber-coloured borderings'. All the chimneypieces
were of marble. (fn. 39)

The houses were said to have been built "under
the practical superintendence of Mr. John Walls' (fn. 34)
who, as an 'estate agent', appears in the Post
Office Directory in 1859–62 in one or other of
these houses, probably used as an estate office. To
help sales, Jackson adopted the unusual expedient
of finishing the houses decoratively himself. In
April 1857, in the five houses nearly finished, 'the
cornices and centre flowers of the dining-rooms
and breakfast-rooms are being tastefully etched in
gold. The walls are papered in oblong panels, with
lightly ornamented margins'. In the double
drawing-room on the first floor the stucco cornices
were also 'etched in gold' and the walls had
'richly-gilded paper in panels'. Jackson had had
the woodwork painted 'French white', with
gilding, and had papered the bedrooms. (fn. 39)

Figure 44:

Nos. 5 and 7 Queen's Gate, ground-floor plans in 1856

In February 1858 Jackson received leases of
two new houses, Nos. 20 and 21 Queen's Gate,
which extended the row to the southern boundary
of Lord Harrington's property. (fn. 40) The insignificance
of these boundaries compared with those of
the building lessee's territory is, however, shown
by the fact that Jackson did not continue the
architecture of Nos. 1–19 but instead adopted an
even richer façade-design, probably not by
Richardson, that he was also applying to the five
houses, Nos. 22–26 (consec.), which he was
building immediately southward on the Commissioners'
land (see below).

Richardson later estimated that the cost of
building each of Nos. 1–19 was about £4,000 for
those with twenty-five-foot frontages and £5,000
for the wider houses. (fn. 41) An approach to the London
Assurance Corporation for an advance of up to
£40,000 on his entire holding under Lord
Harrington as building progressed proved unsuccessful, (fn. 42)
and Jackson at first raised money by
private mortgages, arranged largely through a
solicitor, Dalton Haskell Serrell of Gray's Inn,
among whose clients were other members of the
Serrell family. (fn. 43) (He was also acting as Richardson's
solicitor in 1863. (fn. 44)) Within a short time,
however, Jackson was turning to other insurance
companies and banks, the principal ones being
apparently the Provident Life Office, the Commercial
Bank of London and the Western Bank
of London. (fn. 45) Some of the houses were let at rack
rents for comparatively short terms (No. 13 and a
coach-house at the rear being leased in 1858 for
twenty-one years at a rent of £510 (fn. 46)). But
Jackson, like his rival builders, preferred sales to
provide himself with cash. Usually he sold the
houses subject to a fairly high ground rent, giving
him both a capital sum and an improved ground
rent. No. 19, for instance, was sold in 1859 for
£5,000 at a ground rent of £65 per annum,
representing a surplus of £40 on the £25 which
had to be paid to Lord Harrington. (fn. 47) These improved
rents were usually then mortgaged by
Jackson. (fn. 46) Occasionally he sold his lease outright
at the original ground rent, as in the case of No.
11 and its coach-house, for which he obtained
£7,738 (out of which sum £6,500 went to
mortgagees). (fn. 48)

These houses were quite successful with
potential occupants. The first took up residence
in 1857 (fn. 49) and in 1858 five appear in the Post
Office Directory. All twenty-one were listed in
1862, when the residents included the Earl of
Dundonald and three 'Sirs'. In 1863 H. A. Bruce,
Home Secretary from 1869 to 1873, began his
long residence at No. 1. (fn. 50)

The five houses at the north-west corner of
Queen's Gate extending along Kensington Road,
and now numbered 1A Queen's Gate and 1–4
Hyde Park Gate, were more expensive to build
(Plate 83a, 83b; fig. 45). On the lithograph of
March 1857 they are shown as five houses facing
Kensington Road, obviously intended to be
designed by Richardson. By December they were
sufficiently completed to be leased by Lord
Harrington to Jackson, but as four, not five,
houses and were correspondingly bigger. (fn. 51) As
was probably the case at Nos. 20 and 21 Queen's
Gate, Richardson's design was, for an unknown
reason, not used and these grandiose houses were
designed by the architect John Tarring, normally
a practitioner in chapel-building. He superintended
their erection with the assistance of a
'practical foreman', Mr. Thwaites. (fn. 52) They rose
through six storeys to a height of eighty-five
feet—amply sufficient to kill a workman who fell
from the top in November 1859. (fn. 53)The Building
News publicized them as they neared completion
in 1859–60. 'These buildings', it stated, 'may be
fairly classed with the best specimens of domestic
architecture around London, both in respect to
their artistic treatment, and workmanship. No
expense has been spared by Mr. Jackson to make
them thoroughly sound and durable.' (fn. 52) The
journal was particularly enthusiastic about the
corner building, originally intended as only one
house. This 'enormous mansion' has a hundredfoot
tower in Queen's Gate (where early alterations
to allow the subdivision of the house into
No.LA Queen's Gate and No. 1 Hyde Park Gate
have confused the composition of this front), and
its spacious interior was intended to have thirtyfive
rooms, including a dining-room fifty feet
long. (fn. 54) That Jackson had, indeed, spared no
expense on the five houses is indicated by the sum
he could raise on these houses in mortgages,
which by May 1859 amounted to £35,000 with
an option for £5,000 more. (fn. 55)

By the early summer of 1859, however,
Jackson was in very serious financial difficulties.
A seemingly satisfactory deal with another builder
had relieved him profitably of his liabilities on
part of Lord Harrington's estate (see below). But
he had, in effect, exchanged this commitment for
one at least as exacting on the Commissioners'
property, and his troubles were doubtless compounded
by those of his brother Thomas, who
was bankrupt by the autumn. (fn. 56) Perhaps, also, the
outlay on Tarring's big houses was ill-judged.
Some years later Richardson said that it was 'in
the completion' of those houses that Jackson had
'failed', and in the early summer of 1859 Richardson
tried to persuade a client of his, James
Whatman, to buy the unfinished houses, alter
and improve them, and dispose of them at 'a great
profit'. Whatman preferred an alternative enterprise
of the same kind lower down Queen's Gate. (fn. 57)
Jackson did not in fact become bankrupt, but
may nonetheless have welcomed intervention by
William Tarte, the lead merchant who had
previously been responsible for the building of
Nos. 5–16 Hyde Park Gate. (Nos. 14–16 had
been built for him by Thomas Jackson, see page
35.) In 1861 Tarte took an assignment of the
original lease of the corner house, already subdivided
(probably at his behest) and surrendered it
to the Earl of Harrington in return for two new
leases, which were granted directly to him. (fn. 58)

Figure 45:

No. 2 Hyde Park Gate, ironwork details

Tarring's houses did not attract residents very
quickly. The four houses fronting on Kensington
Road were first occupied between 1863 and
1866. (fn. 49) The first occupant listed at No. 3 Hyde
Park Gate was, briefly, Lord Feversham. At No.
I it was one of South Kensington's comparatively
few industrialists—a sixty-seven-year-old selfmade
ironmaster from Middlesbrough, John
Vaughan, whose company had 'gone public' with
a capital of three and a half million pounds. (fn. 59) The
other half of the divided corner house, No. 1A
Queen's Gate, first appears in occupation in 1870.

Jackson also built stables and coach-houses in
the part of Queen's Gate Mews on Lord Harrington's
land. Additionally he built here one of the
few public houses in this part of South Kensington,
the Queen's Arms, which he let in 1859 for
thirty years at £130 per annum. (fn. 60) Its site had been
transferred from the Commissioners to Lord
Harrington in the previous year for no very
apparent reason. (fn. 61) Just possibly, if the dedication of
the site to drinking was already decided upon, the
Commissioners preferred not to be the ground
landlords.

Jackson's 'deal' with another builder referred
to above had concerned the part of the Harrington
estate lying on the south side of Queen's Gate
Terrace. Perhaps in consequence of his failure to
obtain a big mortgage-loan from the London
Assurance Corporation in June 1855 (fn. 41) Jackson
evidently decided to reduce his liabilities temporarily
and in August 1856 agreed that this area
of about six acres should be developed by Charles
Aldin, a builder working in Clapham. Aldin was
to pay Jackson about £200 per annum per acre,
or roughly twice the rate of ground rent which
Jackson had originally agreed to pay for the land.
The transaction was soon known in the office of
the Commissioners, where the enhanced price
Jackson was getting gave satisfaction and was
doubtless borne in mind when they began their
own building enterprises through Jackson himself
a year later. (fn. 62)

The circumstances of this development from the
Commissioners' point of view have been indicated
earlier (see page 62). Liking Jackson's work in
Queen's Gate it was natural they should make
their initial building agreement with him, in the
late summer or autumn of 1857. With a frontage
to Queen's Gate at Nos. 22–26 (consec.), and a
long frontage on the south-facing side of Queen's
Gate Terrace (as well as a frontage to Gloucester
Road) it is not surprising that Jackson should pay
a higher ground rent than Aldin was paying to
him to the south: in fact, it was very much more,
and under a ninety-nine-year lease was to rise in
four years (not ten as on Lord Harrington's
estate) to £1,500 per annum for some three and a
quarter acres, or about £460 per annum per acre.
The houses were all to be 'first class'. As elsewhere
on the Commissioners' estate, separate
leases of each house-site were to be granted when
the houses were built and one house left undemised
until the whole ground was covered. (fn. 63)
Perhaps the fact that Aldin's range on the south
side was already nearly completed encouraged
Jackson, but his agreement was an example of the
unusually favourable return the Commissioners
succeeded in obtaining as ground landlords, and
fairly soon it seems to have helped to get him into
his difficulties. But he started quickly and received
his leases of Nos. 22–26 Queen's Gate in June
and November 1858. (fn. 64) It seems inherently
probable that they and Nos. 20–21 should have
been designed by Richardson, but the fact that
he neither claimed nor received credit for them is
negative evidence of some weight, and it was
another architect and surveyor, Thomas Cundy
III or 'the younger', who applied to the parish
vestry on Jackson's behalf to make sewers behind
them and (later) in Queen's Gate Mews. (fn. 65) Cundy
did cultivate some merely speculative or business
interests in the neighbourhood (and by 1861 had
in fact bought No. 22 Queen's Gate from
Jackson (fn. 66)); but there are resemblances between
these Queen's Gate houses and Queen's Gate
Mews on the one hand and houses and mews
lower down Queen's Gate on the other, where the
developers (the Commercial Bank of London)
were associated with Cundy in his role as architect
(see page 298), and it is therefore possible that he
was the architect of Nos. 20–26 Queen's Gate
(figs. 54, 65 on pages 286, 309). (fn. 2)

On the north side of Queen's Gate Terrace
Jackson received his leases of Nos. 2–44 (even)
between January 1859 and February 1860. (fn. 69)
Perhaps because Jackson felt the need for caution
they were not as large as Aldin's houses, but
formed an over-extended centre-and-wings composition
(Plate 83d; fig. 66 on page 310). The
elevation and plans had been approved by Prince
Albert in July 1858. (fn. 70)The Building News said in
1859 that the bouses were 'under the general
special management of Mr James Matthews,
architect', (fn. 54) who applied on Jackson's behalf to
make a sewer. (fn. 71) No 'architect' of that name
appears in the London Post Office Directory,
unless he is identifiable with a 'builder and house
agent' of Bishopsgate. (fn. 3)

During 1859 Jackson was mortgaging his
houses for unknown amounts to various private
individuals, (fn. 73) but also to the Commercial Bank of
London mentioned above: in 1860, for example,
he mortgaged to them Nos. 2–12 Queen's Gate
Terrace and No. 26 Queen's Gate, which were
already security for £18,000 borrowed from an
insurance company. (fn. 74) As has been seen he was by
then in trouble and although he was saved from
actual bankruptcy, seemingly by his connexion
with the Commercial Bank, he had to discontinue
his building work here with his houses
unfinished and the five westerly sites in Queen's
Gate Terrace unbuilt. There he was supplanted
by another builder, William Watts of Motcomb
Street, Belgravia, to whom the Commissioners
granted leases of Nos. 46–54 (even) in January
1863, (fn. 75) and whose houses adhere to and complete
the overall composition.

Jackson's embarrassment seems to have given
opportunities to other men in the property
business. In 1860 he sold his interest in the
unfinished No. 36 Queen's Gate Terrace to
Thomas Cundy (fn. 76) who also, as has been seen,
bought No. 22 Queen's Gate, probably when it
was auctioned, together with Nos. 23 and 24
Queen's Gate and No. 4 Queen's Gate Terrace,
in 1860. The Queen's Gate houses went for an
average of c. £5,050: the other two were seemingly
bought by Lewis Cubitt. (fn. 77) The auctioneers
themselves had bought two houses in Queen's
Gate Terrace from Jackson's mortgagees, (fn. 78) and
Henry Hunt, Jackson's own surveyor as well as
the Commissioners', bought four others at the
same time, August 1860. (fn. 79) None of these houses
was bought for the purchaser's residence. Cundy
and his brother C. F. Cundy also took leases of
coach-houses and stables in Queen's Gate Mews
in 1863. (fn. 80)

Nos. 22–26 Queen's Gate were first occupied
in 1862–3 and Nos. 2–54 Queen's Gate Terrace
in 1860–5, with people of title among the first
residents. (fn. 49)

At Nos. 56 and 58 Queen's Gate Terrace (the
latter now also No. 15 Gloucester Road) and at
No. 13 Gloucester Road Jackson was supplanted
by Charles Gray, an architect with a liking for
prominent corner sites, who received his leases
from the Commissioners in August 1863 and
February 1864. (fn. 81) Gray showed a 'first design' for,
and photographs of, Nos. 56 and 58 at the Architectural
Exhibitions in Conduit Street in 1864 and
1865, and The Builder commented on them
repeatedly and favourably. In 1865, however, it
noted that 'the talk of the neighbourhood is
against this house (sic), and decidedly prefers the
houses close by, which are of the speculativebuilders'
sort of Italian, repulsive in their sootbegrimedness
as they might be to us'. (fn. 82)

The first resident of No. 56 Queen's Gate
Terrace was a barrister with a house at Twickenham,
and of the corner house, No. 58, a 'gentleman'
with a country house at Caterham. (fn. 50) This
bold block (Plate 84a, 84b) has lost its distinctive
roof and chimney-stacks, illustrated in The Builder
(and restored on fig. 46).

No. 13 Gloucester Road was first occupied in
1865 by Richard Noble, a builder with a Pimlico
address also. (fn. 50) Gray had evidently disposed of his
lease to Noble, who probably built No. 13 (in a
stucco style very different from Gray's). If so,
Noble presumably built the similar Nos. 1–11
(odd), which were, however, leased by the Commissioners
in 1863 either to Jackson's mortgagees,
the Commercial Bank, or to an auctioneer. (fn. 83)

The builder who had taken Jackson's place on the
other side of Queen's Gate Terrace was at least
equally resilient, and more successful. Charles
Aldin was, according to a descendant, the grandson
of an Uxbridge carpenter and appears to have
begun his building career in a small way in 1845
on one of Thomas Cubitt's developments in
Pimlico. (fn. 84) He was to become the building lessee
also on parts of the Alexander and Commissioners'
estates. He and his sons were eventually responsible
for building over two hundred large houses and
almost as many mews dwellings, mainly in the
rectangle bounded by Queen's Gate Terrace,
Gloucester Road, Cromwell Road and Queen's
Gate. In 1859 Aldin was stated to have upward
of four hundred men working in the various
branches of his building operations. (fn. 85) By 1861 he
had a workshop and yard at what is now the
eastern corner of Queen's Gate Gardens and
Cromwell Road where he continued until his
death in his early fifties in 1871. (fn. 86) He then
employed five hundred men and lived in a spacious
house in Clapham which he had built himself,
with seven members of his family (including his
sons, Charles, junior, and William, who were
also builders), three domestic servants, and a
coachman who lived in his own quarters. (fn. 87)

Figure 46:

(facing page). Nos. 56 and 58 Queen's Gate Terrace

Aldin's solicitors were Mayhew and Salmon of
No. 30 Great George Street, Westminster. An
undated layout plan showing the houses built by
Aldin on the south side of Queen's Gate Terrace
and on the east side of Gloucester Road southward
to the southern arm of Queen's Gate Gardens is
signed by W. J. Mayhew, architect, who, as
architect and surveyor, had the same professional
address as Mayhew and Salmon. (fn. 88) As will be
seen, however, some of these houses—those in
Queen's Gate Terrace—are definitely credited to
another architect. It seems probable, therefore,
that W. J. Mayhew was employed by Aldin as
surveyor rather than architect, particularly as
C. J. Richardson was also extensively employed as
architect by Aldin hereabouts.

Richardson, as an architect interested in
practicalities, gave some publicity to Aldin's
contrivance of a means to introduce air-bricks
into walling. (fn. 89)(fn. c1)

By his agreement with Jackson of August 1856
Aldin was to pay him £1,200 per annum for
about six acres, bounded (in modern terms)
approximately by Queen's Gate Terrace, Gore
Street, Elvaston Mews, Petersham Mews and
Gloucester Road. Aldin was to receive direct
leases from Lord Harrington for ninety-nine
years from 1852, until the total sum in ground
rent due to the Earl under his agreements with
Jackson had been secured, after which the leases
were to be granted by Jackson. Sixty first- or
second-class houses were to be built on the land
within seven years 'in conformity in all respects
with the Ground plans, elevations and specifications
already agreed upon and signed by the said
William Jackson and Charles Aldin except as to
any variations or modifications thereof which
might be mutually agreed upon between the said
parties'. (fn. 90)

In 1856 Aldin began building the great range
of houses, now Nos. 11–43 (odd), on the south
side of Queen's Gate Terrace between Gore
Street and Petersham Lane (Plate 83e; fig. 64 on
page 309). Originally intended to consist of
twenty houses of five main storeys above a basement,
the terrace displays, like Richardson's
designs, an overall stuccoed richness but with
greater emphasis on the whole mass united by its
big cornice. Here the architect was named in
contemporary journals as William Harris of Park
Street, Mayfair. (fn. 91) Little is known about Harris
besides the fact that he died in 1863 at the age
of sixty-six: it was stated at that time that he had
been a pupil of A. W. N. Pugin, (fn. 92) but in view of
their relative ages (not to mention the character
of Harris's design) this was probably a mistake for
A. C. Pugin. It is not known if there is any
significance in the fact that Aldin had a partner
called Henry Harris in his Pimlico building firm in
the early 1850's. (fn. 93) Several of the motifs used in the
façade reappear on other houses built by Aldin in
Queen's Gate and Queen's Gate Gardens, most,
if not all, of them begun well after Harris's death.

Each of these houses contained a dining-room,
breakfast-room, and billiard-room on the ground
floor, a thirty-seven-foot drawing-room with a
conservatory on the first floor, and nine bedrooms,
excluding servants' bedrooms in the roof. The
Building News noted that Aldin provided main
staircases of stone, and servants' staircases projected
at the backs of the houses. (fn. 94) The construction
of these extremely large houses required
capital from various sources. Before any leases
had been granted Aldin mortgaged his agreement
with Jackson for an unknown amount to William
Hallows Belli, a retired Bengal civil servant, who
then lived in Princes Gate and was shortly to
move to a house here at No. 11 Queen's Gate
Terrace. (fn. 95) Aldin also arranged private mortgages
through his solicitors, Mayhew and Salmon.
Another firm of solicitors, Dupasquier and Tremlett,
introduced him to potential mortgagees
among their clients. (fn. 96) His principal source of
finance for Queen's Gate Terrace, however, was
the County Fire Office, which offered him a loan
of £50,000 on the security of the twenty houses. (fn. 97)
Leases of all of them were granted to Aldin by
Lord Harrington in 1857 at annual ground rents
of £25 each. (fn. 98)

Like Jackson, and contrary to usual practice,
Aldin decorated these houses at once (unless
The Building News deliberately made a 'show
house' seem more typical than it was). He also
liked gold on white. In the drawing-rooms he
used enrichments in relief on the ceilings, and
panelled walls, and placed 'immense lookingglasses'
over the white marble chimneypieces of
'quite unique' design. The dining-rooms were
decorated in George Jackson and Sons' papier
mâché. (fn. 99)

The houses 'went' quite well. Some were already
occupied in 1858. (fn. 100) Six appear in the Post
Office Directory in 1860 and all between Nos. 11
and 33 were in occupation in 1861, when the
residents included Viscountess Strangford. (fn. 101)
Nevertheless, in 1862 Aldin, who had been
involved in the previous year in abortive negotiations
to build a large hotel on the Alexander
estate, conceived the idea of floating a company to
convert some of the houses here for the same
purpose. Lord Harrington subsequently consented,
for a 'consideration' of unknown amount. (fn. 102)
With the help of Aldin's solicitors a company was
formed in 1862 but was under-subscribed.
Another company, introduced in 1863, proved
more successful in attracting investors, and six
houses towards the western end of the terrace—conflated in their numbering to 37–41 (odd)—were converted into the South Kensington Hotel,
which was later extended to the corner house. An
extra storey was added, to the detriment of
Harris's symmetry (Plate 83e).

Aldin already had mortgage commitments of
£21,500 on the houses, and besides meeting
these the company paid him about £16,000 in
money and £20,000 in shares, as well as discharging
his interest payments, so that it was
estimated that he received altogether the equivalent
of £62,000 for the property. In addition he
was paid an improved ground rent of £150 on the
sub-lease he granted to the company. Presumably
in return he undertook the conversion as well as
the original construction of the houses. The hotel
opened in October 1864. (fn. 103)

A puff in The Builder announced that the hotel
was 'divisible into larger or smaller suites' and was
designed 'to suit the occasions of families visiting
town for a lengthened séjour as well as the tastes of
single or more limited parties. . . . The peculiar
characteristic of this hotel is, that families can
live as in a private house, and enjoy the advantages
which community only can insure, in the
use of a perfect kitchen, and the discipline of a
complete staff of waiters and attendants, at comparatively
moderate charges'. (fn. 104) Its first year or
two were unprofitable, (fn. 96) but it was, and for more
than forty years remained, the only residential
hotel of its kind in the immediate neighbourhood,
and it survived until c. 1954. (fn. 50)

Along the Gloucester Road frontage southward
from Queen's Gate Terrace Aldin early built a
symmetrical terrace of shops (Nos. 17–35 odd),
with a public house, the Harrington Hotel,
forming the centrepiece (Plate 84b). The carcases
were leased to him in 1857 (fn. 105) and the shops
occupied by 1860. (fn. 50)The Building News reported
that all the lintels and shop-bressummers were of
wrought iron. (fn. 99)

On the rest of his site in the early 1860's he
built Nos. 1–20 and 32–46 (consec.) Elvaston
Place, as a parallel road to Queen's Gate Terrace
(initially closed at its eastern end, where the
Commissioners' estate separated it from Queen's
Gate), and No. 2 Queen's Gate Place, as well as
coach-houses and stables in Petersham Place and
Petersham Mews. The leases of the houses to
Aldin were dated 1861–3. (fn. 106) In the early 1860's,
however, sales of houses hereabouts went slower
than before: the south-facing north side of
Elvaston Place filled up between 1863 and 1867,
but the south side only between 1865 and 1872.
No doubt partly for this reason, and perhaps
because of uncertainty about Elvaston Place's
eastward termination, Nos. 26–31 Elvaston
Place, No. 3 Queen's Gate Place, and Elvaston
Mews were built later (leases 1866–8). The
residents were of good standing (and included
the solicitor who helped Jackson to his mortgages,
Dalton Serrell, at No. 20 Elvaston Place). (fn. 107)

In this part south of Queen's Gate Terrace
Aldin abandoned wholly stucco facings. Possibly
the latter road, like Queen's Gate and Cromwell
Road, was felt to demand stucco whereas Aldin
preferred where he could to employ the facings of
gaults or white Suffolk bricks, with cement or
stucco dressings, that he was using nearby. He
employed an interesting variety of façades.
Including the Gloucester Road shops and the two
double-fronted houses in Queen's Gate Place five
main types occur. On the north side of Elvaston
Place, for example, there are differences of height,
frontage-line and style within a continuous terrace
which was all leased to Aldin at virtually the same
time. (The central 'build' of the terrace, at Nos.
8–13, seems to have been by a year or two the
slowest to 'go' with prospective buyers.) The
most elaborate houses, at Nos. 14–16, are reminiscent
of Jackson's 'terminal pavilions' in Queen's
Gate Terrace and were, no doubt, intended in
Georgian fashion to close the vista up Queen's
Gate Place. The types are identical with those
Aldin had used or was to use on the Alexander
estate—Nos. 8–13, for example, at Nos. 37–43
and 53–59 (odd) Gloucester Road, and Nos.
14–16 at Nos. 5–21 Queen's Gate Place (fig. 73
on page 312), while Nos. 2 and 3 Queen's Gate
Place form half of a quartet of similar houses
spanning the estate boundary.

In this area Aldin's work is also characterized
by his rather distinctive use of arched and battered
party walls, evidently to carry flues up at the rear
of his houses, giving an effect equally noticeable
in aerial photographs and from the lowly mews at
the back (Plates 82c, 88c; fig. 47: see page 317).

At Nos. 17–35 Gloucester Road, where the
symmetry was approved by The Building News, (fn. 99)
the range looks a little like an essay in builder's
architectonics. The leases to Aldin were witnessed
for Lord Harrington and Jackson as
lessors by Richardson. This may have been as the
former's surveyor rather than as architect, but
Richardson later said that Aldin had been one of
his chief employers on the Harrington (as well as
the Alexander) estate, (fn. 108) and if so it would seem
that Richardson's hand must be visible in this part
of Gloucester Road or in Elvaston Place as well
as immediately to the south. Whether, alternatively,
W. J. Mayhew played any part as architect
is unknown.

Figure 47:

Queen's Gate Gardens, flue-arches on north side

Aldin, Richardson and Whatman:
the Alexander and 1851
Commissioners' estates

Adjacent to the property just discussed lay parts
of the Alexander estate (south) and of the 1851
Commissioners' estate (east). Aldin became
involved in both quarters; so, also, did Richardson;
and the development of those two estates
on their adjacent frontages to Queen's Gate was
further brought into connexion by the intervention
of a Member of Parliament of entrepreneurial
instincts, James Whatman. Under their auspices
some of the first phase of building in the area took
place, at Nos. 44–52 (consec.) Queen's Gate. For
these reasons, as well as the architectural continuity
of Aldin's work across the boundary of the
part last discussed, this Alexander—Commissioners'
territory will be reviewed before passing to the
more southerly piece of the Alexander estate,
where other important early developments were
taking place.

H. B. Alexander was busy negotiating with
potential building lessees for both these pieces in
January 1857. His man of business was the
surveyor, George Pownall, who was employed
here seemingly in preference to John Blore,
Basevi's successor as estate surveyor in 1845:
Blore, however, was still acting for Alexander in
the 1860's in matters relating to the older Thurloe
Square property. (fn. 109) On the piece under review a
bidder was evidently William Jackson, then completing
his first commitment on the Harrington
estate in Queen's Gate. These dealings proved
abortive, however, and Alexander and Pownall
concentrated on an offer by C. J. Freake for the
southern part. (fn. 110) Jackson eventually found an
opening on the Commissioners' land (see above),
and in December 1857 Alexander concluded an
agreement with Aldin instead. (fn. 111) As Aldin was
already building immediately to the north this was
a natural arrangement.

The land in question consisted of three fields,
then being used for nursery or market gardens,
with abutments on Gloucester Road, Cromwell
Road and Queen's Gate. The area was fourteen
and a half acres.

Aldin was to take the ground for ninety-nine
years from Midsummer 1857 and to pay an
annual rent rising from £75 in the first year to
£2,300 in the twelfth and subsequent years,
equivalent to about £159 an acre. He was to lay
out the ground for building in accordance with an
annexed plan, and build roads, sewers and paths
which had to be finished by 25 March 1860. The
plan provided for the laying out of a large square
with a central garden (sometimes called Prince's
Gardens c. 1858 but soon named Queen's Gate
Gardens (fn. 112)): the road pattern was designed to fit
in with already-existing roads on adjoining
estates. A total number of 127 houses and 51
stables was envisaged by the plans, Aldin undertaking
to build at least 10 houses and 5 stables
every year. The houses facing Queen's Gate had
to be the equal of Freake's houses 'now erecting'
in Cromwell Road, that is, Nos. 13–19, and the
rest were not to be inferior to those on the east and
west sides of Thurloe Square. Plans and elevations
of the houses had to be submitted for
approval to Alexander's surveyor before building
began. When the houses were covered-in leases
would be granted to Aldin or his nominees at
ground rents which were to be not less than £5
per annum and not more than one sixth of the
estimated rack-rental. The time-schedule was
fairly realistic and the whole development was to
be completed by 25 March 1871. (fn. 113)

The layout featured the type of variant upon
the 'square' that occurs in Ladbroke Square of the
1840's and, with further variation, in Onslow
Gardens and which became so characteristic of
Kensington. By this arrangement—usually (as
here) given the designation 'Gardens'—the row
of houses on one side of the square was turned to
face outward to a road 'behind' that side, sometimes
being numbered in that road and sometimes
not. The houses presented their backs to the
square and opened more-or-less directly onto its
communal garden, which on that side was not
separated from the houses by a foot-or carriageway.

Figure 48:

Queen's Gate Gardens, gateway to central
enclosure

The author of Alexander's layout may have
been Richardson rather than his surveyor
Pownall. The squares in Pownall's scheme of
1852 for the Villars estate had been conventional,
and although Richardson himself did not specifically
claim credit for the layout he said in 1868
that in and before 1859 he had 'acquired an
extensive practical acquaintance . . . especially in
connexion with the laying out and improvement
of new squares and mansions in the neighbourhood
of the site on which the buildings of The Great
Exhibition of 1862 were subsequently erected', (fn. 114)
and it is not obvious what other 'square' than
Queen's Gate Gardens this may refer to. In 1860
Richardson's client Whatman, as will be seen, sent
Richardson's elevation for Nos. 44–52 Queen's
Gate to Prince Albert. Whatman reported to
Richardson that it had been well received on the
Prince's behalf by Sir Charles Phipps, 'and he
wishes to know where I procured the plan of the
ground as the Prince has not seen any so advanced.
With your elevation and my letter of explanation I
sent the tracing of the adjacent rows etc which you
gave me in July [that is, 1859] and in reply I have
said that you did so and that I believed the respective
proprietors in letting their land a year or two
before had fixed the number of houses to be built
on them and the amount of ground rent to be paid
to them for each house and I added that if I
found on enquiry that I was mistaken I would
inform him (Sir C. Phipps).' The 'adjacent rows'
may have referred to the 1851 Commissioners'
land in Queen's Gate, immediately north of Nos.
44–52, but the reference to the 'respective
proprietors' makes it sound as if the tracing
showed a wider area. (fn. 115) As it happens, there is a
summary plan by Richardson in the library of the
Royal Institute of British Architects that may
date from c. 1859, which shows this part of the
Alexander estate as on the Alexander—Aldin
agreement plan of 1857 and the Harrington and
Commissioners' estates northward. The part of
the Commissioners' estate then unbuilt is shown
not quite as realized. (fn. 116) Conceivably this is, or is
closely related to, the plan Whatman sent to the
Prince.

In any event, it seems certain that Richardson
acted as Aldin's architect for at least the internal
plan of some of the Queen's Gate Gardens houses
(see below).

Aldin began promptly by building a row of
houses at Nos. 37–59 (odd) Gloucester Road,
originally called Petersham Terrace (a placename
'borrowed' from the estate of Lord
Harrington, whose son and heir was styled
Viscount Petersham). He used the white Suffolk
brick with Portland cement dressing that he was
to employ extensively hereafter. The architectural
form of the façade, which he repeated in
Elvaston Place, was a simple late Georgian that
gave the basic pattern on which houses in Queen's
Gate Gardens and elsewhere were elaborated.
Possibly it represents Richardson's hand, at his
plainest, unless, indeed, W. J. Mayhew had some
part in it.

They contain five storeys over a basement,
with a clear room-height of thirteen feet six inches
on the first floor. All had conservatories at the
back. (fn. 117) Most of the houses were leased to Aldin
in October 1858, (fn. 118) and all were occupied by
1860. (fn. 49) The mixed bag of comparatively youthful
first occupants included two doctors, a future Lord
Mayor of London, a daughter of Lord De L'lsle
and Dudley, and a grandson of William IV and
Mrs. Jordan. (fn. 119)(fn. 4)

Aldin next built a row of ten larger houses
further south in Gloucester Road. The leases
were granted to him in March 1859, (fn. 121) and the
houses filled up, with some well-known family
names, between 1859 and 1863. The first
occupants included Sir James Outram and another
grandson of William IV, the Earl of Munster.105
These houses, the site of which is now occupied
by Campbell Court, were not numbered in
Gloucester Road, but as Nos. 1–10 Queen's
Gate Gardens (Plate 84c). Their small private
gardens backed directly on to the communal
garden.

Aldin then moved across to Alexander's
Queen's Gate frontage. There he started work,
probably early in 1859, on nine important
houses—three to the north and six to the south of
Queen's Gate Place, at Nos. 44–52 (consec.)
Queen's Gate. But by the summer, when only
the southern group was above ground and only
one of those as high as the first floor, he had
suffered the same misfortune, at about the same
time, as Jackson (and other Kensington builders).
He had, as Richardson said, 'overbuilt' himself,
and ran out of cash. Obtaining credit from his
suppliers became very difficult. (fn. 123)

Where Aldin had hitherto raised the capital he
needed on the Alexander estate is not clear—some of it, certainly, by mortgages to private
individuals, for example Nos. 55 and 57
Gloucester Road to a gentleman of Brentwood
in January 1859. (fn. 124) He seems to have borrowed
quite extensively from two gentlemen of Ledbury
in Herefordshire, but his most important early
backer appears to have been Major-General Lord
William Paulet, from whom he had obtained at
least £18,000 by October. (fn. 125) But virtually none
of the twenty-two recently built houses in
Gloucester Road had yet been occupied in the
summer of 1859, and his other expenses had been
heavy. Compared with the properties largely
fronting on the roads made by the 1851 Commissioners
this part of the Alexander estate imposed
on the builder a relatively heavy burden of
roadmaking and garden layout in its 'hinterland'.
This had to be completed by March 1860 and
alone cost Aldin £20,000. (fn. 126) Aldin was thus in
the position, so common with his fellow builders,
of being unable to finish his houses.

Aldin was saved by Richardson and Richardson's
client, James Whatman (for whom Richardson
had recast his country house at Vinters Park near
Maidstone as well as altering his town house in
Carlton Gardens). In the early part of 1859
Richardson was looking out, on Whatman's
behalf, for signs of builders in difficulties, whose
uncompleted house-carcases could be bought,
finished, and disposed of at a profit. Failing to
interest Whatman in Jackson's Hyde Park Gate
houses, in July 1859 he persuaded him to relieve
Aldin of these nine houses in Queen's Gate. Ten
years later this trouble-laden decision issued in a
Chancery case brought by Richardson against
Whatman that gives an abundance of information
(and perhaps misinformation) about these and
adjacent houses. Because of this detail, because
the nine houses are some of the most conspicuous
in the area, and because Aldin by no means disappeared
from the scene, this development will be
noticed before returning to Aldin's other activities
on the Alexander estate (Plates 31a, 85, 86a; figs.
49–52, 68 on pages 278–81, 310; and pages
315–16). (fn. 127)

Aldin agreed to sell his interest in the nine
sites in return for £8,775, a sum calculated on the
basis of improved ground rents to him of £40 or
£45 for the individual sites (that is, over and
above the £20 he paid to Alexander) at twentytwo
and a half years' purchase. He had put
£3,000-worth of work on the sites for which he
had wanted compensation at cost price, but
probably he had to make do with his improved
ground rents. He required to be employed himself
to finish the houses at an agreed rate by 'measure
and value'. (fn. 128)

Whatman was initially looking for a gross
profit of the order of £25,000, and seems (though
all the arrangements between them were later
called in question) to have agreed to pay Richardson
as architect a reduced commission of 2½ per
cent on cost, plus 20 per cent of the profit: that is,
it was partly a speculative venture between them.
Richardson thought three of the houses could be
finished for £16,000 and, evidently, the nine for
a corresponding amount of about £48,000. He
anticipated a profit of £10,000 plus an improved
ground rent (perhaps making £12,372 in all)
from three houses, or £30,000 (perhaps £37,116
in all) from nine, and thought that they would all
be sold in a year or two. It seems that Whatman
wanted to sell for seventy-five years, leaving some
fifteen years reversion for rack-renting by his
heirs. (fn. 129) In the end, finishing all nine probably
cost some £64,000, or perhaps even 'half as much
again as you maintained they would', as Whatman
told Richardson. (fn. 130) The roofed-in houses were
leased by Alexander to Whatman in 1860, (fn. 131) but
the first house was not disposed of until 1864. By
1863 Whatman was complaining that his profit
was 'an ignis fatuus always in the distance and
always unobtainable'. Richardson agreed—'I
regret extremely having induced you to enter
upon this building business'. (fn. 132)

Originally Richardson had thought the speculation
'a certainty'. (fn. 132) The Horticultural Society's
ornamental garden was in prospect opposite, and
generally his expectations were kept up by the
knowledge of Prince Albert's interest in the
locality—'it was his district'. (fn. 133) The failure
Whatman and Richardson attributed to the ugliness
and (from their point of view) belated
removal of the 1862 Exhibition building (Plate
36a), to the effect of the American civil war, and
to the Prince's death at the end of 1861. (fn. 132) This
last had the immediate effect of curbing their
expenditure on the houses, but a further cause of
their difficulties was the inordinately high outlay
that had already taken place. Richardson claimed
that the internal fittings of the southern six were
as good as those of Whatman's country house. (fn. 134)
At over £7,000 a house it was difficult to recoup
the cost when the early sixties saw a lull in the
demand for houses here.

The blame for the extravagance was of course
bandied between Richardson and Whatman. The
former admitted to pressing the work on hastily
'to keep Aldin on his legs', (fn. 135) but chiefly blamed
Whatman's indulgence of an ambition 'to
illustrate and carry into effect certain designs and a
style of architecture of his own creation'. (fn. 136) He
said Whatman sent him more than one hundred
and fifty letters with 'directions' and, often,
sketches. (fn. 137) 'If, he wrote to Whatman, 'the
exteriors are a little too ornamental it was owing
to you always urging me to do something better
than usual'. (fn. 138) And again, 'You were really the
architect, myself simply the draughtsman', and
'you looked at the houses as an architectural
hobby'. (fn. 139) He complained that Whatman resented
the need to cut expenditure on Nos. 44–46, 'and—excuse me saying—have been in a bad temper
since'. (fn. 135) Whatman refused to use a standard
chimneypiece: 'Your objection to this was, that
it was a great pilaster without either frieze
architrave or cornice, quite true, but I was
obliged to make a design of a very superior and
expensive character to meet your wishes and
criticism. Now the public care nothing about
taste. So long as they have plenty of room, light,
air and water closets all matters of taste are looked
at with suspicion even dislike'. (fn. 140)

Whatman replied that he had suggested the
introduction of 'French balconies', whereupon
Richardson 'magnified them no doubt with good
taste but clearly at a great and as it turned out an
unknown cost'. Otherwise he had merely
suggested improvements in the internal convenience
of the houses—a lift, for example,
which Richardson rejected as impracticable.
Whatman claimed in fact to have tried to restrain
Richardson's decoration. (fn. 141)

Richardson quotes a letter from Whatman in
1860 that shows how pleased the latter was with
the elevations (Plate 85b; fig. 68 on page 310).
'It is a great advance on anything that I have
heard of in France and I intended it to be so when
I suggested the idea. To you, to me, and, I
believe, to everybody else it is a new style of
architecture or of building which is what I wished
and aimed at in explaining my idea to you. I was
satisfied you could carry it out well and I therefore
explained to you my aim and object in suggesting
it. Had you not adopted it I should have done it
myself and certainly I should not have done it so
well.' So pleased was Whatman that he suggested
the design should be patented. (fn. 142)

This proposal understandably defeated
Richardson, who instead had an illustration and
puff inserted in The Builder, announcing Whatman's
aim 'to improve and render more lively the
street elevations ... by making the ironwork a
principal feature in all the stories' (fig. 51). The
balconies or window-guards at four levels give a
distinct air of the Continental boulevard to these
houses and The Builder commented that they
were 'more like modern French houses than those
usually seen'. (fn. 143)The Athenaeum liked the elevations
and described them at some length. (fn. 144)

Richardson attributed Whatman's excessive
zeal largely to his falling victim of a desire to
gratify Prince Albert's ambitions for the area.
Richardson's interest was in the profitableness of
the undertaking but he said that Whatman now
told him 'he did not mind losing £60,000 provided
his aim was gained, that aim being the
finishing the road to the Prince's satisfaction, with
a view to certain personal objects of his own in
which [Richardson] had no interest'. (fn. 136) Whatman
denied this, but did have the elevations of Nos.
44–52 approved by the Prince in January 1860,
although the estate of the Commissioners was, of
course, only adjacent. (fn. 115) He obtained the Prince's
leave to have them called the 'Albert Houses'—a
courtly gesture promptly quashed by the Metropolitan
Board of Works, which disliked subsidiary
street names. (fn. 145)

In this spirit Whatman, with Richardson's
encouragement, extended his holding in the
summer of 1860 by taking the adjacent property
of the Commissioners, extending north to Queen's
Gate Terrace (called in the Chancery case, 'Plot
A'). Jackson had previously agreed to take this,
but being prevented from building by his financial
difficulties had been dispossessed at the beginning
of the year. Whatman had, like Jackson, to pay
the exceptionally high ground rent of £1,500 for
some two and a half acres (or £600 per annum
per acre), but Richardson urged the acquisition
partly because it gave the option to buy the freehold
at thirty-one years' purchase of the ground
rent. He also adduced the fact that Whatman
would have the right to make a road continuing
Elvaston Place to Queen's Gate. He estimated the
value of this to Aldin, as the proprietor of the
already laid-out part of Elvaston Place, at
£10,000, and evidently thought this a factor
manifestly to Whatman's advantage. (fn. 146)

According to Richardson, Whatman had
wanted the style of Nos. 44–52 extended northward.
The Prince approved, and when (in
Richardson's version) he told Whatman 'he
[the Prince] could not enforce this upon the royal
commissioners, [Whatman] took the plot A himself
to carry it out'. (fn. 115)

Richardson's calculations at that time, which he
himself admitted might seem 'visionary', were
that half Plot A could be built up with seventeen
houses and eight stables at a cost of just under
£80,000 to sell for £116,000. The improved
ground rents would exceed the Commissioners'
by £480 per annum, and the whole profit could
be estimated at £47,400. (fn. 147) The difficulties in
disposing of the 'Albert Houses' induced caution,
however, and with the market sluggish Whatman
obtained an extension of building-time from the
Commissioners. (fn. 148) Richardson evidently toyed
with the idea of putting up a cheap 'exhibition
room' (in a meagre North Italian Romanesque)
on the site for the period of the 1862 Exhibition,
rather as Freake did in fact in Exhibition Road,
but did not do so. (fn. 149) In early spring 1862 building
began on Plot A, but only with five comparatively
inexpensive houses not at all resembling the
'Albert Houses' and fronting on Queen's Gate
Terrace at Nos. 1–9 (odd, fig. 74 on page 312).
They were built by a tradesman called Bird at a
contract price of £11,414. (fn. 150) The final total cost
was said to be £15,500. (fn. 151) (The cost included three
guineas for a 'Venetian book', possibly for Mr.
Bird's guidance in detail or decoration. (fn. 152)) Nos.
3–9 were leased to Whatman in 1865 and No. 1
in 1867. (fn. 153) These conventional-looking houses
were designed by Richardson, and although he
recorded a compliment Whatman paid him in the
Reform Club upon his drawings for them in 1861
he again complained of hindrance—'Your wish
for a large window last week put aside 30 of these
drawings. Your alterations yesterday put aside
the whole set and gives me another three months'
work'. (fn. 154) They also wrangled about the plans:
Whatman said that prospective tenants objected
to Richardson's planning which had to be altered
to make the houses let: Richardson replied that
the one house still unlet in 1869 was the one
where Whatman would not allow him to provide
a third room on the ground floor. (fn. 155)

They disagreed about 'marketing' methods.
Richardson, who came to live in Kensington
Square, and set up an 'office' at No. 47 Queen's
Gate, wanted to sell or let houses cheaply at first,
like most developers, to get some occupants in.
Whatman, who in Richardson's view combined
'architectural fastidiousness' with 'excessive calculation
of interest common and compound', (fn. 156) was
more inclined to hold out for a price. For example,
Richardson says No. 45 Queen's Gate cost
£6,499 to finish but Whatman refused £8,000 for
it: in 1869 he was asking £9,000. (fn. 157) Richardson
would have sold No. 48 for £8,000 at 'a small
sacrifice'. It was the 'show house' (and evidently
had one fixed bath). Whatman asserted that it had
cost £9,000, and eventually the sale was lost.
(The prospective buyer had wanted 'two Sienna
columns in the drawing rooms'.) (fn. 158) Richardson
says Whatman rejected one offer because the
applicant was a Jew. (fn. 108)

Some of the 'Albert Houses' were boarded up
for five or six years, latterly with 'labourers'
families' in occupation and the water cut off to
save rates, until, in Richardson's opinion, 'in
warm weather no lady could be taken into
them'. (fn. 159)

In 1864 the 'Albert Houses' began slowly to
let, but Richardson's and Whatman's disappointment
was sharpened by the success of Freake in
disposing of his houses in Princes Gardens (fn. 160) and
caused a disagreement at law between them on the
question of Richardson's rate of commission or
share in the profits (if any) at the 'Albert Houses'
and Plot A. This matter had reached such a state
of confusion that Whatman thought his own
solicitors had failed to apprehend the meaning of
the 'very long and involved' correspondence about
it. (fn. 161) Whatman accused Richardson of spending
money he was not entitled to—a charge that
threw him into a state of painful excitement. ('I
have shown your late letters to my wife, she
agrees with me that if they mean anything at all,
they mean that you will dismiss me ignominiously
on a charge of fraud . . . I will not bear the charge.
I know that dismissal on such a charge would be
ruin to myself and my innocent family, a sentence
to me to follow Q. C. James to Yankee Land,
where I won't go).' (fn. 162)(fn. 5) Richardson, who had told
Whatman originally that 'I am ambitious of
doing a good piece of business for my employer
and getting the reputation of it', found the
dispute becoming notorious and was, he says,
'publicly insulted by a leading member of his
profession'. (fn. 164) By 1865 Whatman was employing
Pownall as his surveyor, and using another house
agent.

Through Pownall, not Richardson, he in that
year effected a measure that Richardson had
envisaged. This was to disembarrass himself of the
rest of Plot A. Charles Aldin's finances were
reviving (partly, no doubt, because of a big loan
from the London Assurance Corporation, and
partly because of the floatation of the South
Kensington Hotel Company): he seems to have
been a flexible strategist and not afraid to give
someone a profit if it would pay him to do so.
Having sold out of Queen's Gate in 1859 he now
bought himself back in again on the Commissioners'
frontage, where he could open
Elvaston Place into the major road. If Richardson
is correct Aldin gave Whatman in rent £200 per
annum more than the £ 1,500 per annum due to
the Commissioners for the whole plot. Calculating
that the five houses Whatman retained could be
sold on lease (evidently at about cost price) to yield
an improved rent of £50 per annum Richardson
decided that Whatman had made a profit of £450
per annum by the sale or (at twenty-two and a
quarter years' purchase) £10,000. (fn. 165) Whatman,
however, denied this.

He had himself by 1863 borrowed £60,000
from the Royal Exchange Assurance on the
security partly of the 'Albert Houses'. The
Queen's Gate Terrace houses became security
later, and by the late 1870's he owed £95,000,
but in these mortgages he was pledging other large
properties as well, in London and Kent. (fn. 166)

Aldin called in the William Watts who had
built Nos. 46–54 Queen's Gate Terrace, and, as
there, Watts built to another's overall scheme.
(He, also, borrowed money from the Royal
Exchange Assurance. (fn. 167)) Watts received his
leases of Nos. 31–34 Queen's Gate from the
Commissioners (Whatman and Aldin being
parties) in June 1867. (fn. 168) Aldin received leases of
Nos. 27–30 and 35–41 Queen's Gate and of
Nos. 21–25 (consec.) Elvaston Place, as well as
of sites in Elvaston Mews and Gore Street, from
the Commissioners in April-May 1868. (fn. 169)(fn. 6)

In a reviving market Richardson persuaded
himself that Plot A now had a selling value of
£150,000 (as he said in 1868) or £250,000
(1869 and 1870). (fn. 170) In 1869 he asserted that
Aldin had already sold two houses freehold, one
for £14,500 and one for £16,000. He thought the
five Queen's Gate Terrace houses worth at least
£35,675 freehold but asserted that Whatman was
in fact asking about £45,000. Both agreed that
the asking-price for the nine 'Albert Houses' was
at least £87,000 leasehold plus improved ground
rents amounting to £2,362 more. (fn. 171)

For these prospects of wealth (some, of course,
rather 'visionary') Richardson thought he had
'laid the foundation' (fn. 172) and in 1868 he submitted
a Bill of Complaint in Chancery against Whatman.
Judgment was given in April 1870, by
which time the case was evidently attracting
attention. (fn. 173) The Master of the Rolls found
Richardson entitled to commission at 2½ per cent
on the cost of all fourteen houses (and back
buildings), and to 20 per cent of any profits arising
from them and also from the sale of Plot A. He
ordered the houses to be sold with liberty for
Whatman to bid for them. (fn. 174) Presumably he did
so, as he still owned some of them in the 1880's. (fn. 175)
The watchful Thomas Cundy III also picked up
at least one small lot. (fn. 176)

Both Richardson and Whatman claimed a
victory. (fn. 173) But for Richardson the case had had an
unfortunate consequence. Aldin was naturally
'very sensitive', as Richardson said, on the subject
of his commercial credit. In 1868 Whatman had
quoted in his printed answer to Richardson the
latter's reference to the reluctance of builders'
merchants in 1859–60 to supply Aldin except
through Richardson. (fn. 7) Thereupon Aldin ceased
to employ Richardson as architect. Both died in
1871—the latter in reduced circumstances. (fn. 178)

The 'Albert Houses' continued to fill up with
residents only very slowly. Six of the nine were
still empty in 1870 (fn. 49) and it was c. 1876 before
they were filled, with the seeming exception of
No. 47 which does not appear in the Post Office
Directory until 1887. Short leases of seven to
twenty-one years seem to have attracted rents of
between £400 and £545 per annum. (New leases
in the 1880's were at lower figures of £350–£400
per annum.) (fn. 175)

Nos. 27–41 Queen's Gate were occupied
relatively quicker, between 1868 and c. 1876.
The first occupants included the Archbishop of
York at No. 38. (fn. 122) The houses somewhat
resemble those that Aldin was to build on the
south side of Queen's Gate Gardens. Richardson
says he had made many drawings for this part of
Plot A, (fn. 179) but he does not say that they were used
and the inference is therefore that they were not.
There seem to be recollections of William
Harris's range in Queen's Gate Terrace, and this
was perhaps the nearest these two rather dull
blocks came to having an architect.

Charles Aldin in the Queen's Gate
Gardens area: the Alexander estate

The development of Queen's Gate Gardens
which had begun with Aldin's leases of 1859 on
the west side, in Gloucester Road, continued in
piecemeal fashion until the last lease was granted
in 1875 to Aldin's heirs after his death.

At an unknown date (but on paper watermarked
1851) Richardson made a set of plans for
an unspecified house in Queen's Gate Gardens. (fn. 180)
Richardson said in 1869 that Aldin had until the
previous year been one of his chief employers on
the Alexander estate. (fn. 108) He must therefore have
had considerable responsibility for the appearance
of the Queen's Gate Gardens area, though perhaps
not of its south side or southward of that.

The lack of overall regularity shows, however,
a falling away under Pownall's surveyorship in
the standard of development on the Alexander
estate since Basevi in the 1840's. (Pownall himself
was living in Onslow Square by the time of
his death in 1893, when he left some £25,000. (fn. 162))

Comparison with what was built indicates that
Richardson's plans probably related to the north
side of Queen's Gate Gardens. They were perhaps
for the guidance of prospective tenants rather than
the builder. Intended for a house to sell at £5,000
they show five storeys over a basement. On the
ground floor was a twenty-two-foot dining-room
at the front opening to a parlour which overlooked
a light-well, and at the back was a twenty-fourfoot
library (with a 'strong-room' off it), lit from
a yard beyond. On the first floor a front drawingroom
occupied the width of the house and opened
to a back drawing-room with a balcony on to the
light-well. In a rear wing over the library was a
boudoir. This wing rose to a mezzanine between
the first and second floors, containing a bedroom
with a fixed bath and an adjacent water closet. On
the second floor were two bedrooms and a dressingroom,
and on two upper floors five more bedrooms,
three with dressing-rooms. A secondary
servants' stair rose from the basement to the
mezzanine. There were two water closets (on the
ground floor and mezzanine) and the one fixed
bath. (The storey in the roof, with the female
servants' bedrooms, is not shown.)

There is no elevation among the drawings that
can be compared with Queen's Gate Gardens as
built, to show whether Richardson was responsible
for the façade. On the north side a careful symmetry
was achieved, despite the fact that the
houses were some six years completing and the
leases were being granted to Aldin from 1860
until 1866 or later (Plate 88a; fig. 70 on page
311).164

Between 1861 and 1863 Aldin had also
received leases of Nos. 24–28 at the northern end
of the east side, (fn. 182) where the design is similar but
the appearance different because of the mainly
brick front (Plate 86b; fig. 71 on page 311). At
Nos. 27 and 28 (leased to him in 1862–3) he used
lotus-leaf capitals in the porches like those
Richardson had designed for Nos. 47–52 Queen's
Gate. By 1865 Aldin had also built some houses
in Queen's Gate Place and was starting others
there.

Early in that year he obtained an important
advantage when he persuaded the London
Assurance Corporation to advance £20,000 to
him on a mortgage of sixty-one house-plots and
forty-one stable-plots on this part of the Alexander
estate. Few houses beyond those on the west side
of Queen's Gate Gardens (Nos. 1–10) had
residents in occupation by then, but those occupants
were, as the Corporation's surveyor, R.
Hesketh, said, people 'of wealth and distinction',
and the South Kensington house market was
evidently looking up again. Hesketh valued the
prospective improved ground rents at £20,417
plus £14,880 for four houses in Queen's Gate
Place then in building. His obviously conservative
estimate was that the houses in Queen's Gate
Gardens would let for £350 per annum, and elsewhere
for £250 per annum, and he usually gave
unfinished houses a prospective value when completed
of about £3,700 leasehold. When, later in
the year, Nos. 14 and 15 Queen's Gate Place
were finished and let, however, he noted that the
rents were £320 per annum, and valued them
leasehold at £5,460 and £5,140 respectively. (fn. 183)

Over the next four years Aldin was able to free
some of his houses from this mortgage when the
value as security of those that were completed
increased. The redeemed houses he often remortgaged
to individuals, and succeeded in maintaining
the essential cash-flow.

In 1866 the number of houses leased to him on
completion, which had fallen to one in 1864, rose
to thirteen and although fluctuating remained
generally higher than before. By the time of his
death in 1871 he had built his houses in Queen's
Gate Place (being completed in 1868) and
Gloucester Road (Nos. 61–69 leased to him in
1868, Plate 84c), and also in Queen's Gate
Gardens (south side leased to him in 1869, fig. 78
on page 314) except on the east side south of No.
28. But in Cromwell Road he had built only two
houses, Nos. 68 and 88A. (At No. 88 the little
single-storeyed National Provincial bank was
built under the supervision of the bank's architect,
John Gibson, on back premises in c. 1882.) (fn. 184)

Aldin had died aged between fifty-one and
fifty-two. His effects were valued at 'under
£160,000'. (fn. 185) His elder son, Charles the younger,
was aged about twenty-six, with a young son of
his own, Cecil, who later recalled him as 'an
enthusiastic amateur artist' (and himself became
well known as a sporting artist and master of
hounds). (fn. 186) Charles carried on the business, however,
with his younger brother William (aged
about twenty-one), and a trustee of his father's
will. Alexander gave them an extension of time to
complete the layout, (fn. 187) which they did by 1875.
In Queen's Gate Gardens they built Nos. 29–39
(leased to them in 1872 and 1874, Plates 86b, 86c,
87), approximately in the style of the other houses
on that side, and in Cromwell Road virtually all
the two similar stuccoed blocks, Nos. 54–66 and
68–86 (even, leases 1870–4), that augmented the
patchwork of the firm's styles by carrying the
canted bay windows up to the second floor. In
1874 they set up in an office on their old site at the
newly built No. 39A Queen's Gate Gardens: (fn. 188)
in 1878 they had a stone-merchant's wharf in
Chelsea.

As elsewhere in South Kensington, the
proximity of unbuilt house-sites seems in itself to
have been little deterrent to prospective occupants,
and despite its piecemeal development the Aldins'
houses around Queen's Gate Gardens attracted
people of title among their first residents—the
Earl of Strathmore, for example, at No. 41 there
(1871), or the Countess de Salis at No. 65
Gloucester Road (by 1873, fig. 75 on page 313).
Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth was the first
occupant of No. 68 Cromwell Road in 1874. (fn. 50)

Hesketh's assessment of leasehold values here
seems to have been more than borne out by the
£5,800 Aldin obtained for No. 28 Queen's Gate
Gardens in 1863 and the £6,800 his successors
obtained for No. 64 Cromwell Road in 1875. (fn. 189)

In Queen's Gate Place the quartet of doublefronted
houses at Nos. 1–4 (leased to Aldin on
their completion in 1862, 1862, 1866 and 1864
respectively) are notable for their almost institutional
severity, rather like taller and sternly
revised versions of C. H. Blake's house of 1853
in northern Kensington. (fn. 190) The two on the
Alexander estate were first occupied by a director
(and son of a Governor) of the Bank of England,
Bonamy Dobree, at No. 4, and a successful
'company lawyer', William Burchell, at No. I
(fig. 55). (fn. 191) As solicitor to the Metropolitan
Railway, whose most crucial Bill he steered
through Parliament, Burchell seems a very
suitable occupant of a big plain house here in
South Kensington.

The rest of Queen's Gate Place was in one of
the 'Elvaston Place' styles (Plate 89d; fig. 73 on
page 312). When moving into No. 8 as its second
occupant in 1876 Walter Bagehot felt the need
to summon William Morris and Company to
redecorate it. Morris took part of the work in
hand himself, 'composing the drawing-room as he
would an ode'. There were De Morgan tiles, and
the inner hall was 'treated as a special feature'.
Morris's slow progress meant that the work was
unfinished when Bagehot died in 1877. (fn. 192)

Meanwhile on Alexander's property that lay
southward of Cromwell Road some early and
important developments had been undertaken by
the most notable house-builder in post-1851
southern Kensington.

(Sir) Charles Freake's work in
Cromwell Road and Cromwell
Place: the Alexander estate

From 1852 onwards there had been intermittent
approaches to buying Alexander's land by the
1851 Commissioners (page 58) but by November
1856 Pownall was deeply involved in negotiations
for an agreement with the builder Charles
James Freake. (fn. 193) Alexander himself took an
active personal interest in its preparation and was
not content merely to leave things to Pownall. It
was Alexander who insisted on some stiffening of
the specifications to avoid giving the impression
'that a less substantial style of building than in
Thurloe Square will be tolerated'. Such specifications,
he argued, really benefited the builders,
who knew how to make good use of 'the substantial
style of building they were restricted to'
as a selling point in discussions with prospective
purchasers. (fn. 194)

In March 1857 Freake signed an agreement
for the development of the Grove House site,
including the terrace of eight old houses on the
north side of Old Brompton Road called King's
Head Row. He was to take the ground (less
Cromwell Road itself) for a ninety-nine-year
term, from 25 March 1857, at an annual ground
rent rising from £200 in the first year to £850 in
the fifth and following years (that is, more than
£200 per annum per acre). An appended plan
(probably made by Pownall) provided for the
construction of a new north-south street (Cromwell
Place) between Cromwell Road and Old
Brompton Road, and the building of rows of
terraced houses along the frontages of this new
street and of Cromwell Road. A total of fortyeight
houses was envisaged, considerably more,
in fact, than were built. Before any houses could
be erected Freake had to obtain the approval of
Alexander's surveyor for the plans and elevations.
Along the Cromwell Road frontage the houses
were to be the equal of No. 63 Onslow Square,
and elsewhere they were not to be inferior to the
houses in Cranley Place, both examples being
drawn from Freake's own building development
on the Smith's Charity estate in South Kensington.
Individual houses would be leased to Freake or
his nominees at ground rents (to be determined by
Alexander's surveyor) which were not to exceed
one-sixth of the estimated rack-rental or be less
than £5 a year. At least ten houses had to be built
every year and the entire development had to be
finished by Christmas 1864. (fn. 195)

Enough for more than enough) stables were
provided for every one of the thirty-one houses
that Freake actually built. These were mostly in
Cromwell Mews, which Freake laid out behind
the houses on the west side of Cromwell Place.
Two of the houses in Cromwell Road (Nos. 31
and 35) had stables in their back gardens—both
approached through Cromwell Mews—and a few
of the houses on the east side of Cromwell Place
were provided with stables on the west side of
Thurloe Place Mews. (fn. 8)

Charles James Freake (1814–84) was undoubtedly
one of the most important builders
operating in London during the middle years of
the nineteenth century, employing, in 1867,
nearly four hundred men. (fn. 196) The surveyor, Sir
Henry Hunt, described him to his and Hunt's
friend (Sir) Henry Cole as 'the Cleverest of all the
speculating Builders' who 'never departed from
his word'. (fn. 197) Like Cubitt, with whom he was
frequently compared, he made a great fortune out
of speculative building, leaving on his death an
estate worth some £718,000. (fn. 198)

Part of Freake's early life had been spent in
Belgravia, where his father, a coal merchant
turned publican and wine merchant, ran the
Royal Oak in Elizabeth Street. (fn. 199) It was indeed in
Belgravia, on the Grosvenor estate, that Freake
appears to have begun his career in 1839 as Seth
Smith's nominee for leases of houses in Chester
Terrace. (fn. 200) But his most important work was in
Princes Gate and Exhibition Road and elsewhere
in South Kensington, particularly as building
lessee on the Smith's Charity estate, around
Onslow Square, from the 1840's to the 1870's. (fn. 201)
Freake's houses seem often to have been taken,
both formally and informally, as a standard of
comparison for other builders' work. At the time
of his death it was possible for an obituarist to
claim that 'Sir Charles . . . "made" the neighbourhood
of South Kensington, raising it from a neglected
suburb to the rank of a second Belgravia'. (fn. 202)

His ambitions were social as well as commercial,
and after 1849 he had disappeared from the
'commercial' section of the Post Office Directory
and continued as an 'esquire' in the 'Court'
section (where he had been listed since 1846). (fn. 9)
In the census of 1851 he described himself as an
architect as well as a builder, (fn. 203) and from 1853
he also appears as 'architect' in the directories at
some professional address in South Kensington
near wherever he was living. The notices of his
house-building in periodicals, presumably inspired
by him, imply (rightly or wrongly) that he was his
own architect. In 1869 the Post Office Directory
shows his chief assistant, James Waller, replacing
Freake, under the same designation of 'architect',
at Freake's office in Onslow Gardens.

From about the same time Waller (presumably
the 'gentleman' of Putney who was made a trustee
of Freake's will) is named in the district
surveyors' returns as 'builder' of most of the
houses erected under Freake's auspices. No doubt
this was, as in the building of the National
Training School for Music, a fiction (see page
219), but Freake was probably withdrawing from
day-to-day business. In 1868 he stood unsuccessfully
as one of the Conservative candidates for the
Parliamentary constituency of Chelsea which
included most of his property in South Kensington. (fn. 204)

Freake lived in a grand town house of his own
building (Plate 91a). In the eyes of commentators
he seems to have been set apart from his rivals by
the fact that he owned the freehold of some of the
properties on which he built. (fn. 205) His house,
however, was leasehold, on this part of the
Alexander estate at No. 21 Cromwell Road,
where he lived from 1860. (fn. 49) In 1871 he was
occupying it with his wife and daughter, three
female relations, a butler, two footmen and seven
other servants. (fn. 206) He became one of Sir Henry
Cole's circle, and the latter's diary records
attendances at the musical or theatrical performances
staged by the Freakes, doubtless in the
great ballroom at the back of their house: sometimes
the Prince of Wales was present. (fn. 207) Freake's
career culminated in the baronetcy given him in
1882, chiefly in recognition of his erection at his
own cost of the National Training School for
Music (Plate 71a) in 1874–5. The School was an
object of interest to the Prince who, in the opinion
of Gladstone's political secretary, had 'persistently
and somewhat questionably (if not "fishily")'
pressed Freake's name on the Prime Minister.
But the secretary admitted that of all that clutch of
baronets-designate Freake was the one who was
'known to ordinary fame'. (fn. 208)

From the 1850's Freake also had a house in
Twickenham: by 1872 he was able to buy
Fulwell Park there for £69,500, and in 1877 he
built Twickenham Town Hall on a site he
owned. At his death he possessed extensive estates
in Twickenham and Kingston-upon-Thames. (fn. 209)

The first houses to be built by Freake on the
Alexander estate under the agreement of March
1857 were Nos. 13–19 (odd) Cromwell Road
(Plate 91c). They were started in about June of
that year, and leased to Freake early in 1859. (fn. 210)
Henry Cole looked them over at the time, without
comment, but The Building News (a journal
evidently sympathetic to Freake), which had
reported the erection of these four houses,
claimed to find a 'considerable amount of picturesque
beauty displayed in their design'. (fn. 211) The
treatment of the façades was more elaborate than
in some of the other large houses already built by
Freake in Exhibition Road, and The Building
News especially admired the raising by an attic
storey of the two end houses in the group (Nos. 13
and 19), thereby avoiding what it called 'the
ordinary monotonous horizontal street outline
"against the sky" '. (This effect is now diminished
by the addition of an attic storey at No. 15.) Each
house had a forty-one-foot dining-room and a
library or morning-room on the ground floor, two
drawing-rooms and a boudoir on the first floor,
and eleven bedrooms. There was also a bathroom. (fn. 212)
The houses were successful, all being in
occupation by 1860. The first residents were a
general, a colonel, a major and an admiral. (fn. 49)

In Cromwell Place Freake reverted to building
houses with much plainer façades, that were
equally successful (Plate 91b, 91c; fig. 67 on page
310). Those on the east side were all leased to him
or his nominees in May 1859, and were occupied
by 1860. (fn. 213) There were originally only four
houses properly so called on this side, the two
buildings at the northern end, described in the
leases as consisting only of 'a basement and one
square storey over', being first occupied as
studios. (fn. 214) One has been heightened and united
with the adjoining house, No. 4, probably in
1867, during its occupancy by the artist Sir
Coutts Lindsay. (fn. 215)(fn. 10)

Studio-building became a feature of Kensington
developments in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century but its occurrence here is perhaps a sign of
Freake's perceptiveness, and Cromwell Place
attracted some artists who could pay his rents.

On the west side of Cromwell Place all the
houses north of the entrance to Cromwell Mews
were leased to Freake in May 1861, (fn. 216) except for
No. 6, which was not leased to him until August
1862. One of the witnesses to that lease was Lewis
Cubitt, the architect, though in what capacity he
was acting is not known. (fn. 217) The first occupant of
No. 7, in 1861, was Millais, who remained here
until 1878. George Godwin, the editor of The
Builder, lived at No. 6 from 1874 until his death
in 1888. (fn. 122)

Work on the four houses south of the entrance
to the mews (Nos. 15–18) was interrupted by the
construction of the Metropolitan and Metropolitan
District Railways and they were not
completed and occupied until between 1872 and
1874. (fn. 218)

So far Freake had followed fairly closely the
agreed plan, his total of twenty-three 'houses'
being only five fewer than originally envisaged.
But along the Cromwell Road frontage, west of
Cromwell Place, there was a considerable departure
from the agreed plan. For the twenty
houses in a terrace or row Freake was allowed to
substitute eight very large double-fronted houses
of which four were detached and the rest semidetached. (fn. 219)
Originally called Nos. 1–8 Cromwell
Houses, they were later renumbered as Nos. 21–35 (odd) Cromwell Road: Nos. 31–35 have been
demolished (Plates 50b, 90c, 90d, 91a; figs. 56–57).

No. 33 was being roofed-in in September 1858,
when the surveyor to the 1851 Commissioners
was already referring to it as 'the Duke of
Rutland's new House in Cromwell Road' and
rejoicing in the 'character and value' his residence
here would give to adjacent properties. (fn. 220) It was
not until 1860 that the Duke moved from
Princes Gate into the house (which was not in
fact leased to Freake and sold by him to the Duke
until 1861) (fn. 221) but the surveyor's remark seems to
confirm, what might be conjectured, that Freake
secured at least one worthwhile potential customer
before proceeding far with this change of plan.
The first house to be leased to Freake, however,
was No. 35, in May 1859, (fn. 222) followed by Nos.
31 and 33 in May 1861. (fn. 223) Photographs taken
during the erection of the building for the 1862
Exhibition on the opposite side of the road show
No. 21 finished (and occupied) in October 1861
and Nos. 23 and 25 in carcase in March 1862,
when Nos. 27 and 29 were not even begun. (fn. 224) In
February 1863 the leases for Nos. 21 to 29 were
all granted to Freake. (fn. 225)

As has been mentioned, Freake was not afraid
of the effect of his taking one of the first houses
himself and occupied No. 21 in 1860, when the
only other resident in this row was the Duke. (fn. 122)
Freake remained there until his death. These
houses were not occupied quite so promptly as
Freake's earlier ones. A reason was doubtless the
Exhibition building on the other side of the road.
In March 1861 he had told the Exhibition's
instigator, Henry Cole, that 'he was reconciled to
the building opposite'. (fn. 226) Freake must have known
that the house-builder and contractor, John Kelk,
had attributed his own slow sales in Princes Gate
to the presence of the Crystal Palace of 1851
opposite, but perhaps he did not expect the 1862
building to be so oppressive to Cromwell Road or
to survive until the autumn of 1864. Before and
during the Exhibition itself a formidable congestion
of traffic was generated in Cromwell
Road (Plate 90d), (fn. 224) from which the smaller
houses in Cromwell Place were saved by a bar
across their road, which was then still private. (fn. 227)(fn. 11)

The Duke of Rutland left No. 33 quite soon,
in 1865. (fn. 49) (A champion of the Exhibition building
gossiped that Lord John Manners's animus
against that structure in the House of Commons
had derived from his brother's dislike of it.) The
other houses filled up between 1863 and 1868.
Their first occupants included the Earl of Durham,
Lord Cairns and Lord Blantyre. (fn. 49)

Freake liked to sell the leases of these big
houses, and obtained a high price and a high improved
ground rent. He sold Nos. 23–29 between
1864 and 1870 at prices ranging from £9,500 to
£11,000, for terms of seventy-six to eighty years,
and reserved ground rents of £85 per annum at
No. 23 and of £140 per annum at Nos. 25–29.
At each his own ground rent to Alexander was
only £18, so that at No. 25, for example, he was
obtaining (on the usual basis of twenty-two and a
half years' purchase for the capital valuation of an
improved ground rent) the equivalent of £13,745,
for a seventy-six-year lease with a ten-year reversion
for his heirs at the end of the term. (fn. 229) By
1913, however, the asking price for a thirty-year
lease of Nos. 31 or 35 was down to £5,000–£5,500, and for a forty-year lease of No. 33 to
£6,500. (fn. 230)

In Cromwell Place Freake sold No. 8 in 1861
for £3,915 at the original ground rent for the rest
of his term, No. 4 in 1865 for £4,700, and No.
17 in 1872 for £3,150. He granted a lease of No.
1 in 1860 for £214 10s., himself paying a ground
rent of £24: the lessee at No. 3 sub-let at £254 in
1865. It was presumably a sign of the decline in
the status of this part of South Kensington that in
1887 the lessor of this last house could obtain only
£173 per annum. (fn. 231)

Freake's own balance-sheet is unknown. Between
1857 and 1861 he raised very large sums
of money (certainly £80,000 and perhaps
£140,000) from the County Fire Office on the
security of his property in Princes Gate, (fn. 232) and
also borrowed some £126,000 from the Royal
Exchange Assurance, (fn. 233) but it is not known how
he financed his undertakings on the Alexander
estate in particular.

It is not only by their size that Freake's
'Cromwell Houses' are distinguished from most
of the surrounding houses. Unlike those, the
'Cromwell Houses' were provided by Freake with
quite large back gardens (Plates 1, 31a). Freake
also showed unusual restraint in their architecture,
whoever was the designer (Plate 90c; fig.56).
The principal decorative features are the segmental
and triangular pediments to the firstfloor
windows, which have balustraded balconies,
a heavy bracketed cornice with a deep floral
frieze, and long and short quoins. The backs of
the houses are plain almost to a fault, relieved
only by a colonnaded terrace at ground-floor-level
with steps down to the gardens. (The ground level
at the front of the houses was about ten feet above
the level of the gardens at the back.) In 1868 The
Building News could look back regretfully to the
'greater taste' displayed in these houses 'than is to
be seen elsewhere in South Kensington', and
recommended them to its readers as 'worthy of
especial notice in these days when nothing is
supposed to go down with the public but French
roofs, Gothic gables, Italian parapet balustrades
with vases, forsooth, atop, parti-coloured materials,
and polished granite'. (fn. 234)

Although the houses were not all alike even
when first built, evidence relating to Nos. 25, 27,
29 and 35 suggests that most or all had the same
simple and rather Palladian plan (fig. 56). On
entering No. 35, for example, a large staircase
compartment lay on one side. Ahead, a corridor
led through to a door on to the terrace. Opening
off this corridor, beyond the staircase compartment,
was a square library lit from the garden. On
the other side of the house a 'noble dining-room'
extended its full depth, but was subdivided by a
pair of columns (probably, as elsewhere, Ionic in
scagliola). The first floor was wholly occupied by
a suite of two (or three) intercommunicating
drawing-rooms and a spacious staircase-landing.
The three upper storeys (one at No. 35 being an
early addition) contained eight main bedrooms, a
bathroom, boxroom, housemaid's closet, cistern
room, and five servants' bedrooms. The usual
domestic offices were in the basement, from which
a servants' staircase rose behind the main staircase. (fn. 235)

Figure 57:

No. 27 Cromwell Road, interior details

Astonishingly, Freake's houses, big as they
were, were not always big enough. No. 35 was
the one house to remain a long time without a
permanent occupant, and perhaps for that reason
had been raised a storey between 1861 and 1868,
before any resident appears there in the Post
Office Directory. (fn. 236) An extra storey was added to
No. 27 in 1872 (fn. 237) and to No. 15 in 1876. (fn. 238)

In 1873 Richard Norman Shaw prepared
designs for an internal remodelling of No. 23 for
a new occupant, C. L. Norman (a partner in
Baring Brothers), but it is uncertain whether they
were carried out. (fn. 239) Alterations and extensions
were made at No. 25 for Gottlieb Jacobson by
George and Peto in 1880 and some of this work
seems to survive. (fn. 240)

Freake's lead in Cromwell Road had meanwhile
been followed very shortly by the building of other
houses immediately to the east. These were raised
on the 1851 Commissioners' estate by another
builder of Pimlico-Belgravian provenance.

John Spicer in Cromwell Road:
1851 Commissioners' estate

In September 1858, when Nos. 13–19 Cromwell
Road were under construction, the 1851 Commissioners
invited tenders for a building lease of
the triangular piece of ground to the east, between
(in modern terms) Cromwell Road and Cromwell
Gardens on the north and Thurloe Place on the
south. (The circumstances of this from the Commissioners'
point of view are indicated on page
62.) By January 1859 an agreement had been
concluded with John Spicer of Denbigh Street,
Pimlico. (fn. 241) According to his obituary in The
Builder in 1883 he had begun his activities in
Pimlico in 1845, and in 1856 had taken a large
quantity of building land in South Kensington on
the Gunter estate. He continued until the end of
his life with building operations in parts of South
Kensington to be discussed in a future volume,
but, like Freake, made his home in a house he
built in this area—although not on Freake's scale
of grandeur. After giving his address for a time as
'Park Lodge, Thurloe Square' (probably the house
on his triangle visible in early photographs and a
former appendage of Brompton Park), he moved
in 1867 into his new house, the comparatively
moderate-sized No.1 Cromwell Gardens (Plate
92b; fig. 58). There he remained until (or nearly
until) his death in 1883. His wife, his son (a
solicitor) and three daughters lived with him, but
very unusually in this neighbourhood he had only
one 'general servant'. The Builder, whose editor
was in a good position to know, remembered him
with respect. 'Thoroughness was with Mr Spicer
a first consideration. Few men have given more
thought or care to their business, and his desire
always was that whatever he undertook should be
done in the best manner.' (fn. 242) Evidently this paid:
he left nearly £300,000. (fn. 243)

Spicer agreed to take the land—little more than
one and a quarter acres—for ninety-eight years
from Michaelmas 1858 at a ground rent rising in
four years to £650 per annum. The ground had a
high proportion of road frontage and Spicer was
paying a very high annual rent of some £520 per
acre. At that time Exhibition Road did not continue
southward of Cromwell Road, and the
whole of the main frontage from Freake's houses
eastward nearly to what is now the apex of the
triangular public garden in front of the Victoria
and Albert Museum was intended to be covered
by nineteen or twenty houses, with seven more on
the southern frontage. Spicer was required to
build five houses in the first two years and cover
the whole ground in four. The houses fronting
Cromwell Road should be architecturally 'not
less important than those then already erected',
that is, Freake's Nos. 13–19. Each was to cost
not less than £2,000 to build. (fn. 244) In May 1859
Prince Albert's secretary said that the Prince
thought Spicer's plan for the houses 'will do very
well' (the Commissioners' secretary endorsed this
as being approval of 'designs' for the houses). The
Prince, however, had recurrent doubts how Spicer
would cram so many houses on the site. (fn. 245) The
Kensington Vestry rather diffidently expressed
regret that the site was to be built over at all, as it
would prevent 'an additional improvement in this
very important locality'. But their objections
were brushed aside, (fn. 246) and by 1860 Spicer had
built seven houses at the west end of his frontage,
which were leased to him in August and October. (fn. 247)
In 1861 he assigned three of the seven to
another builder, John William Sanders of
Guilford Street, St. Pancras, who also took leases
of stables in Thurloe Place Mews. (fn. 248)

Spicer later claimed that the seven houses had
each cost him on average £5,000 to build. (fn. 249) Of
the seven four survive as Nos. 1–7 (odd) Cromwell
Road (fig. 69 on page 311). They were not
very rapidly occupied, perhaps because of the
uncertainty about the location of a railway station
hereabouts. They first appear in the ratebooks in
1864–6, when the first occupants included
Viscount Walden and Elizabeth Bowden, an
important benefactress of Brompton Oratory. (fn. 12)

The applications to the local authorities on
Spicer's behalf in connexion with these houses
were made by an architect, William Scurry, of
Scurry and Wright, Salisbury Street, Strand (the
firm that later, in 1872, remodelled the elevation
of the Adelphi Terrace. (fn. 251)) Scurry was referred
to in 1862 as 'Mr Spicer's Architect': (fn. 252) probably,
therefore, he designed these houses.

Photographs of 1861–2 show the still-unbuilt
eastern part of Spicer's triangle walled-off, with
his board visible in one, advertising 'first-rate'
houses to be built upon the site (Plates 4b, 6a, 7a,
36b). (fn. 253) But two developments prevented the full
execution of Spicer's programme, and realized
some of the vestry's hopes. Early in 1860 inhabitants
of Thurloe Square had approached
Henry Cole as secretary of the Department
occupying the site on the other side of Spicer's
triangle, to have the eastern apex kept free of
building. (fn. 254) The Commissioners were not now
unsympathetic, provided the inhabitants and the
Department found the funds to compensate
Spicer. (fn. 255) Negotiations finally succeeded in March
1865, when he assigned the ground in question
back to the Commissioners, who granted occupation
of it to the Department so long as the Government
held the Department's main site for purposes
of science or art. Spicer was paid compensation of
£4,104, a sum that the Department supplied for
the purpose by selling a piece of ground in
Exhibition Road to Freake, (fn. 256) who subsequent to
April 1867 (fn. 257) built three houses upon it (Nos.
70–72 Princes Gate). In 1866–7 Spicer made the
road on the west side of the ground that leads to
the west side of Thurloe Square, inhabitants of
which contributed to the cost. (fn. 258) The open space,
the maintenance of which was transferred in
1936 from the Office of Works to the Borough
Council, (fn. 259) is kept as a public garden.
Secondly, at about the same time, the establishment
of the South Kensington Station caused
Exhibition Road to be extended across a more
westerly part of Spicer's triangle. The Metropolitan
Railway Company bought out Spicer's
interest in the site of the road for £7,500, agreed
to pay £150 of his ground rent to the Commissioners,
and pulled down the easternmost of
his new houses (Plate 36b), which lay in the path
of the road. In 1865 Spicer began to build seven
houses on the island site, optimistically called
Cromwell Gardens, left between the intended new
road on the west and the other new road bounding
the open triangle on the east. Later that year he
agreed to buy the reversionary freehold from the
Commissioners for £1,900 and it was conveyed to
him or his solicitor in March 1867, subject to the
continued use of the ground for domestic residential
purposes only. (fn. 260)

The houses were finished by 1867 and Spicer
promptly moved into No. 1. (fn. 261) But perhaps
because of nuisance caused by the slow progress
of the railway company in making the Exhibition
Road extension the other houses took ten years to
fill up.

Spicer claimed, truthfully or not, that the two
houses facing Exhibition Road together cost him
£16,000. (fn. 262) The arrangement of the seven
demonstrates the willingness of Spicer to pack a
site closely that alarmed the Prince (fig. 58). It
was ingeniously done, with each of the five larger
houses being given three rooms on the ground
floor (a dining-room, morning-room and study)
and a separate servants' staircase. (fn. 263) The main
front of the range was orderly and quiet, the
flank fronts more complicated and lively (Plate
92a, 92b). The architect, by his own account, was
the assistant district surveyor for this area, Alfred
Williams, who in 1868 said he had 'for several
years' acted as Spicer's 'architect and surveyor'.
In his official capacity he also inspected their construction. (fn. 264)

The houses soon became unattractive as private
residences owing to the growth of heavy traffic.
They were bought by the Office of Works in
1912 for some £38,500 and among various uses
proposed for the site was to house a new Royal
College of Art in c. 1913 (see page 260). Instead,
the houses were leased from 1920 for occupation
by the Institut Francais until the site was sold in
1937 to the Shakespeare Memorial National
Theatre Committee. The houses were then
demolished and it was proposed to build a
National Theatre here. Sir Edwin Lutyens made
designs in 1937–8 (fn. 265) but nothing was done and in
1974 the site remained vacant.

On the other side of Freake's holding in Cromwell
Road lay the 1851 Commissioners' third and
largest detached piece of property. Of some five
and a quarter acres it was taken, at the same time
as Spicer's and Jackson's plots, by a builder whose
work in this area was to be extensive, prolonged
and, in the end, spectacularly unsuccessful.

William Douglas's ground had relatively more
'hinterland' than Jackson's or Spicer's on the
Commissioners' estate, with correspondingly more
need of roadmaking. He paid relatively less per
acre than they, although his ground rent rose in
four years to the still high figure of £1,250 per
annum, or some £238 per annum per acre. (fn. 266)

Although born in Scotland Douglas had come
to London in 1837 while in his early twenties
and began business in Lowndes Street as an upholsterer
in 1841. (fn. 267) By 1858 he described himself
also as an auctioneer and house- and estateagent,
and it was in this last capacity that the
Commissioners' surveyor thought of him. (fn. 268) But
from 1859 he called himself builder instead of
upholsterer in the Post Office Directory, with a
'Hans Town works' off Sloane Street, as well as
his Lowndes Street office, although in the census
of 1861 he still declared himself an upholsterer,
with forty employees. His private residence was
then in Fulham: (fn. 269) later he moved to Barnes.

In October 1859 Prince Albert was toying
with the idea that Douglas should be encouraged
to build a hall for the removal to South Kensington
of the 'Smithfield shows' of the Agricultural
Society, for which the requirement to build
houses only would have been waived. (fn. 270) But
nothing came of it and by December 1860 the
Prince approved Douglas's plans for a layout of
terrace-houses, after requiring him to widen the
road he was proposing to make. (fn. 271) This was
probably Queensberry Place although by 1862
Douglas had also made an abortive road joining
Queensberry Place to Queen's Gate. A drawing
of 1862 (Plate 31a) suggests that the Commissioners
may have hoped to carry the line of
the road eastward across Freake's holding from
Alexander. (fn. 272) But by 1868 the building of Nos. 8
and 10 on the west side of Queensberry Place is
evidence that the road had been abandoned. (fn. 273)

The Commissioners' surveyor, Hunt, found
Douglas troublesome—'the only Tenant on the
Commissioners' Estate who treats all my expostulations
with defiance and contempt' (fn. 274)—and
Douglas seems to have gone to work rather
leisurely, perhaps because of the depressing
prospect of the Exhibition building opposite. In
Queensberry Place (which he named after a
mountain of his native Dumfriesshire (fn. 275)) Douglas
was finishing his first four houses early in 1862: (fn. 276)
north of Queensberry Mews West and Queensberry
Way he received leases of newly covered-in
house-sites in 1863–5 (east side) (fn. 277) and 1867–8
(west side), (fn. 278) and south of that crossing he
received leases in 1869. (fn. 279) Until at least 1895
the southern end of Queensberry Place was
separated from Harrington Road by a small planted
area. (fn. 280)

In Cromwell Road Douglas built Nos. 37–41
(odd), east of Queensberry Place, by 1868 (fn. 281)
(leases dated 1863, 1870 (fn. 282)), when he had also
built the first three west of Queensberry Place (fn. 281)
(leases 1866 (fn. 283)). The remaining leases westward
to the corner of Queen's Gate and southward to
No. 123 in that road were granted to him in
1870–2 (figs. 72, 81 on pages 312 and 315). (fn. 284)
The bricks for these houses probably came from
Douglas's own brickworks near Southend, having
been barged up the Thames to Chelsea. (fn. 275)

In 1859–66 the Scurry and Wright who
evidently acted as Spicer's architects were acting
as Douglas's surveyors and may therefore have
designed at least the earlier of his houses. (fn. 285)

Douglas's houses in Queensberry Place (Plate
114b) appear in occupation in the ratebooks and
Post Office Directory between 1865 and 1873.
From 1866 to 1870 he himself had an office in
the small house originally called 'the Lodge' at
No. 1 A that is now conspicuous by rebuilding in
red brick. (fn. 286) The first private occupants of what
was then a cul-de-sac included people of title, six
army officers, Prince Murat at No. 15 in retreat
from the Commune, and that centrally SouthKensingtonian
figure, Lyon Playfair, at No. 4.
The last bought the freehold from the Commissioners
in 1869 before moving in. (fn. 287) Perhaps
encouraged by the occupation of Queensberry
Place, Douglas, who in the 1871 census called
himself a builder employing some two hundred
men, (fn. 288) bought the freehold of almost all his
ground from the Commissioners in 1874 for an
unknown sum, the conveyance of most of the
plot being evidently made to his solicitor. (fn. 289) The
greater part was promptly mortgaged to two
barristers of Lincoln's Inn but the sum for which
it was security is not known. (fn. 290)

It is known that in 1879 he sold a seventyseven-year
lease of No. 41 Cromwell Road to a
doctor for £6,900 at a ground rent of £75 per
annum. (fn. 291) But Douglas also let houses furnished,
evidently retaining his early interest both in
house-agency and in furniture-making. (fn. 292)

Nos. 37–41 (odd) Cromwell Road had been
first occupied in 1869–71, (fn. 49) but Nos. 43–57
appear in the Post Office Directory only from 1874
onwards. In Queen's Gate occupants appear even
later, between 1877 and 1888, and unlike in
Douglas's other ranges included no people of title.
The canopies and shutters (now removed) that
are shown in old photographs were probably
added as an afterthought of Douglas's, perhaps to
constitute a selling-point in a dull market (Plate
89c). He himself dated the decline in the value of
his properties to about 1878. (fn. 293) By the 1880's
this end of Queen's Gate was moving into the
doldrums (and at No. 122 nearby the first use
was actually as a private hotel (fn. 50)). Douglas himself
had occupied the corner house, No. 57 Cromwell
Road, as his office from 1878, and his daughter
recalled in the 1950's how the fast horses that he
chose for his yellow-and-black carriage brought
him in from their big house at Barnes in a quarter
of an hour. When he moved out c. 1885 No. 57
was turned into flats. (fn. 294) The evidence of surviving
features inside the houses on this part of the
Commissioners' estate is that the relatively limited
success of Douglas's work with potential private
residents in the 1870's was not due to any
skimping of the interiors, where the joinery
(perhaps because of his experience as an upholsterer)
was quite ingenious (fig, 59) and well
made.

Figure 59:

No. 49 Cromwell Road, staircase detail

Douglas's story is continued later (see page
305). Meanwhile, on the west side of Queen's
Gate the range of houses opposite Douglas's had
been built earlier and occupied more promptly, as
part of the development of the largest piece of the
Harrington estate. Many builders were involved
(including Douglas himself), and with one
exception work had begun about 1865.

The Commercial Bank of London in
southern Queen's Gate and around
Stanhope Gardens:
the Harrington estate

Most of this area was developed under the
direction of the Commercial Bank of London.
This rather unusual state of affairs stemmed from
the bank's involvement with William Jackson as
his mortgagee at the time of his near-bankruptcy
in 1859. His position was saved by the bank's
willingness to continue to advance him money,
but this led eventually to its taking the management
of his building operations out of his hands.
The bank itself had failed in 1861, when It was
found that a ledger-keeper had embezzled a considerable
sum, and, in order to prevent a run
on the bank, its customers' accounts were transferred
to the London and Westminster. (fn. 295) It
continued in existence, however, in order to
realize its assets, which were largely tied up on the
Harrington estate, to provide a return for its
shareholders. This process took over fifteen years,
in the course of which, according to its chairman,
the Commercial Bank virtually changed its
character from a banking concern to a property
company. (fn. 296)

By 1863 the Commercial Bank's directors had
decided to foreclose on Jackson, but entered into
an agreement with him whereby he would not
oppose the decree of foreclosure, receiving back in
return (in 1865) some land on which he was to
build at least twenty houses. At first he obtained
only the frontage to Gloucester Road between
Crownwell Road and the east-west arm of Stanhope
Gardens, where he had his own builder's
yard. Later, however, part of the west side of
Stanhope Gardens was also made available to
him. (fn. 297) Jackson, in turn, secured new financial
backers in Ransom, Bouverie and Company, the
bankers, of Pall Mall, (fn. 298) and continued building
in various parts of South Kensington well into the
1870's. (fn. 301)

In their development of the land the directors
of the Commercial Bank had the services of
Thomas Cundy III as architect and surveyor.
Cundy succeeded both his father and grandfather
of the same name as surveyor to the Grosvenor
estate and is chiefly noted as the architect of
domestic buildings in eastern Belgravia and of
several churches in the West End of London. (fn. 299)
This was not the Cundy family's first association
with the area. Charles Fishlake Cundy, his
brother, (fn. 300) was a solicitor who took assignments
of some leases and was involved in several other
transactions in his professional capacity, particularly
those of the County Fire and Provident Life
Offices. (fn. 301) He was also Freake's solicitor, (fn. 302) and
both he and Thomas Cundy held shares in the
County Fire Office. (fn. 303) As has been seen, in 1860
Thomas Cundy had purchased an unfinished
house in Queen's Gate Terrace from Jackson, (fn. 304)
and had applied to the Kensington Vestry for
permission to build sewers in Queen's Gate
Mews. (fn. 305)

When the bank took over Jackson's building
land in 1863 the time limit specified in Jackson's
agreements with the fifth Earl of Harrington was
shortly due to expire, and some houses needed to
be built quickly to fulfil the agreements. At first
the estate refused to extend the limit and the
bank's directors decided to build several houses,
for which Cundy provided the designs, under
contract. (fn. 306) In 1866, however, an agreement was
concluded between the seventh Earl on the one
hand and Herbert Taylor and Jonathan Hopkinson,
two of the bank's directors, on the other. (fn. 307)
Although the terms of the agreement are not
known, they presumably allowed the directors to
proceed in a more leisurely fashion and the land
was developed partly by contract and partly by
letting to speculative builders.

One partial exception to the general pattern
was the house, No. 52 Cromwell Road (now
demolished). As early as 1859 this was leased by
Lord Harrington, on Jackson's nomination, to
Edward Potts, a solicitor, and was occupied by
1860. (fn. 308) It differed in architectural character, and
in its possession of a sizeable garden, from houses
of the neighbourhood. The house was unique in
being built in single isolation (as can be seen on
Plate 31a), and remained so for ten or more years.
It was in fact probably the house of which Frank
Fowke tells an anecdote—that it was built where
it was because its owner thought he had discovered
the intended line of the underground
railway and hoped to be compensated for disturbance. (fn. 309)(fn. 13)

The only other houses on this part of the
Harrington estate to be built north of Cromwell
Road were the big terrace-houses at Nos. 53–67
(consec.) Queen's Gate. The leases were granted
by Lord Harrington between 1866 and 1869.
Those of Nos. 53–57 were made to the builder
William Watts, and those of Nos. 63–67 to
another builder, George Smith of Cathcart Road,
South Kensington. The intervening Nos. 58–62
were evidently built by or for H. W. Marler of
Charles (now Seville) Street, Lowndes Square,
variously described as estate agent, auctioneer and
surveyor. (fn. 310) Nevertheless the range originally
formed a symmetrical composition. This can never
have been easily discerned and has lost its southern
terminal feature with the demolition of Nos.
65–67. The architectural treatment is similar, in
simpler form, to that of the earlier Nos. 20–26
Queen's Gate. Whoever was the architect was
presumably responsible for the unusual and
picturesque arrangement of Nos. 9–37 (odd)
Queen's Gate Place Mews at the rear, which also
seems foreshadowed in the earlier Queen's Gate
Mews. His identity is uncertain but it is perhaps
significant that Thomas Cundy III had had some
active role at the earlier site (see page 268).

The houses filled up with wealthy occupants
between 1866 and c. 1874. (fn. 122)(fn. 14)

South of Cromwell Road, Stanhope Gardens
(Plate 89a) was probably laid out to a design of
Cundy's of c. 1862. Some substantial changes,
however, seem to have occurred thereafter, as
both a plan on a deed of 1863 and the Ordnance
Survey of 1865 strangely show a rather smaller
central garden already laid out within boundaries
inconsistent with the house-building that was
shortly to follow: by 1872 the present extent of
garden was established. (fn. 112) Although Cundy
almost certainly did not design all of the houses
built under the Commercial Bank's auspices,
several can be confidently attributed to him. Nos.
1–18 Stanhope Gardens, on the east side (now
demolished, Plate 89b), were built to his designs
by William Higgs, the notable Lambeth-based
contractor, (fn. 313) who in 1865 submitted the lowest
tender, at £52,789 (or some £2,933 each). (fn. 314)
Nos. 19 and 20 (also now demolished) were not
erected until about 1874 when building leases
of them were granted to William Douglas, (fn. 315)
although whether they were erected to Cundy's
designs is not known. The delay in building these
final two houses in what was originally a twentyhouse
terrace was no doubt caused by the construction
of the Metropolitan and Metropolitan
District Railways (now the Circle and District
lines), which run in a tunnel to the south of No.
20. (fn. 15)

Nos. 32–43 Stanhope Gardens, on the south
side, appear also to have been mostly built under
contract, and their close similarity to the now
demolished houses on the east side leaves little
doubt that they were designed by Cundy (fig. 79
on page 314). Leases of these houses were granted
by Lord Harrington either to the first occupants
or to Herbert Taylor, with the exception of Nos.
33 and 34 which were leased to John Wilkins of
Pimlico, builder. (fn. 317)

Cundy was also the architect of Nos. 68–87
Queen's Gate. Henry Jeffery, another builder
who had been working in Pimlico, undertook to
build the first six of these houses, Nos. 68–73, as a
speculation, and when he applied successfully to
the London Assurance Corporation in 1866 for a
loan of £15,000 to enable him to complete the
houses he stated that they were being built 'under
the plans and supervision of Mr. Thomas
Cundy'. (fn. 318) The cost of building each house was
estimated by the company's surveyor to be
£3,000, and Jeffery had also to pay on each a
ground rent of £7 to Lord Harrington, and an
improved ground rent of £23 (presumably to the
Commercial Bank), which he proposed to buy at
twenty-three years' purchase for £3,174 for the
six houses. The surveyor estimated that the leasehold
value of the six houses when completed would
be nearly £30,000 and that they provided ample
security for the loan. (fn. 319)(fn. 16) The builder of most of
the other houses in this terrace is not known, but
two leases were granted to the H. W. Marler who
was also involved further north in Queen's
Gate. (fn. 321) The two southernmost houses, Nos. 86
and 87, were built under leases granted to Freake
in 1870, (fn. 322) but he adhered to Cundy's designs.
The Queen's Gate houses filled up in 1868–75.
Lord De L'lsle and Dudley was a first occupant,
and the others included a number of army officers.
The Herbert Taylor at No. 84 was perhaps the
bank director. (fn. 122)

The main characteristic of the houses south of
Cromwell Road which are known to have been
designed by Cundy is a restraint in the treatment
of the stuccoed façades which contrasts sharply
with the ornate style favoured further to the north
and is more closely related to the simpler Italianate
of Belgravia. Undoubtedly, however, these houses
in the vicinity of Stanhope Gardens were intended
to be more modest than those nearer the
Park, and the directors of the bank probably
required Cundy to produce designs for houses
which would be sufficiently competitive with
those of other developments nearby. On the
whole Cundy's sense of display was reserved for
bringing out the rhythm of his terraces. At Nos.
68–87 Queen's Gate, for example, where the
articulation can be discerned, albeit with difficulty,
through the leaves and branches of the trees in
front, a successful composition has been created by
the projection and recession of its parts and subtle
variations in the use of dressings, particularly
pediments.

The remaining houses in Stanhope Gardens
were erected by various speculative builders under
leases granted by Lord Harrington with the
consent of Herbert Taylor, on behalf of the
Commercial Bank, between 1870 and 1876. On
the south side Nos. 21–23 were leased to
Freake, (fn. 323) and Nos. 24–31 and 44–45 to Douglas.
On the west side Nos. 46–56 (fig. 83 on page
315) were also leased to Douglas, (fn. 324) Nos. 52 and
53 being separated by a garden over the line of the
underground railway. The lessee of Nos. 57–62,
together with Nos. 81 and 83 Cromwell Road,
was Jackson, (fn. 325) Nos. 59–79 (odd) Cromwell
Road, which back on to Stanhope Gardens, were
originally intended to be built by the George
Smith who had earlier built some houses in
Queen's Gate, but Smith's interest was assigned
to Charles Aldin, probably by mortgagees, in
1869, and Aldin proceeded to build this orderly
terrace (figs. 76–77 on page 313). (fn. 326) The rear
elevation facing Stanhope Gardens is fully
stuccoed with canted bays rising to the third
floor, and the houses at the ends and centre are
singled out for more elaborate treatment to give a
unified composition to the whole façade. Canopies
were later added over the first-floor windows of
alternate houses. On the Cromwell Road front
both the elevational treatment and the articulation
of the terrace are similar to those in other terraces
known to be by Cundy, and he may well have
provided the designs for Aldin here. Aldin's
successors are known to have let one house, No.
67, to its first occupant, a naval captain, for £360
per annum, in 1873. (fn. 327)

Stanhope Gardens seems to have attracted
occupants fairly readily, most houses filling up
between 1868 and 1875. Obviously very
respectable, few, however, were people of title. (fn. 50)

In Gloucester Road Jackson was the building
lessee in 1866–9 of Nos. 71–85 (odd), which were
designed in the restrained manner of Thomas
Cundy in Stanhope Gardens, and of Nos.
97–117. (fn. 328) Nos. 119–123, south of Stanhope
Gardens, were built by Douglas under leases of
1876. (fn. 329) The shops at Nos. 87–95 were built in
1891 (George Edwards, architect). At No. 101
the shop front in brown and cream faience (fig.
60) was put up by J. Kinninmont and Son for
Chard and Sons, butchers, in 1893. (fn. 330)

The three houses at Nos. 88–90 Queen's Gate
on the Harrington estate south of Stanhope
Gardens were built under leases to Freake in
1870. (fn. 331) If the plan of No. 89 in 1903 is representative
they had the double reception rooms on
the ground and first floors that Freake favoured
elsewhere. (fn. c4) He sold a seventy-three-year term in
that house for £5,100 in 1875, and the purchaser
resold the residue of the term for £6,750 in
1879: by 1903, however, the price for a fortyfive-year
term was down to £1,850. (fn. 332)

Figure 60:

No. 101 Gloucester Road, elevation of butcher's shop front

In the seventies Freake was developing this end
of Queen's Gate under various tenures in an area
of rather late and mixed character compared with
most of the area hitherto discussed.

Freake, Douglas and others in the
Queen's Gate—Harrington Road—Old
Brompton Road area

Queen's Gate, when first laid out in 1854–6, had
ended at a point some one hundred feet south of
the present intersection with Harrington Road
and Stanhope Gardens. The continuation southwards
to Old Brompton Road took place in
1870–1 when Freake, who himself was freeholder
of some land in the area, entered into
arrangements with neighbouring landowners to
enable him to construct the extension and build
on the land on either side (fig. 3; plans B, C in
end pocket). Freake's freehold included a strip of
land on the east side of Clareville Street to the
south of the site now occupied by Our Lady of
Victories School: he had acquired this land, which
had at one time been part of the Lee estate, in
1861. (fn. 333) Adjoining this was a detached piece of
the Alexander estate which included the curtilage
of the Swan Inn in Old Brompton Road. Further
to the east lay the four-acre estate of Mills'
Charity, and to the south of this was another small
piece of land belonging to Freake which fronted
on to Old Brompton Road and where a group of
cottages had stood for several years. Freake
surrendered his land in Clareville Street to H. B.
Alexander and in exchange the latter gave up
sufficient land for the roadway and conveyed a
small plot on its east side to Freake. The trustees
of Mills' Charity provided the remaining ground
necessary for the roadway and also exchanged land
on its east side for Freake's strip fronting Old
Brompton Road, which was thrown into a
widened roadway when building took place. (fn. 334) As
a result of these exchanges Freake acquired the
freehold of the site on which he later built Nos.
108–112 (consec.) Queen's Gate.

In 1870 Freake entered into building agreements
with both H. B. Alexander and the trustees
of Mills' Charity. (fn. 335) Under these agreements,
on the west side of Queen's Gate Freake built
Nos. 91–99 (consec.) on the Charity's land (fig.
80 on page 314), and Nos. 100–107, together
with Manson Mews and Nos. 2–6 (even) Clareville
Street, on the Alexander estate, the line
of the backs of Nos. 91–99 following the boundary
between the two estates. On the east side,
apart from his freehold houses, Freake was
responsible for the building of Nos. 113–116
Queen's Gate, all Manson Place (fig. 82 on page
315), Nos. 62–92 (even) Old Brompton Road
and the western side of Reece Mews, all on the
Mills' Charity estate. For his building land from
Alexander, amounting to about one acre, Freake
paid an ultimate yearly ground rent of £450, and
for that on the Charity's lands, about three acres
in extent, he paid £500, for ninety-nine-year and
ninety-seven-year leases respectively. (fn. 336) Although
all the leases were granted to Freake, notification
of the commencement of building operations was
usually given to the district surveyor by James
Waller, who used the same professional address
as Freake—No. 48 Onslow Gardens (see page
288).

Freake's houses at Nos. 91–116 Queen's Gate
filled up fairly quickly, appearing in the Post
Office Directory between 1872 and 1879. The
first occupants included the same sprinkling of
titled people, M.P.'s and army officers as further
north, although the area went down rather
sooner. (fn. 50)

To the north of No. 116 Queen's Gate is St.
Augustine's Church, the site of which had been
conveyed to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners by
Mills' Charity in 1869. (fn. 337) Further to the north
were Methwold's Almshouses, then in the
ownership of the Metropolitan and Metropolitan
District Railways; they were demolished by 1874,
when the land on which they had stood was sold
to the builder William Douglas (Plate 77b, 77c). (fn. 338)
Between the sites of the church and the almshouses
lay a tiny triangular plot belonging to Mills'
Charity on which No. 117A Queen's Gate was
built; this plot was leased to Freake in 1876. (fn. 339)
Nos. 118–122 (consec.) Queen's Gate were built
on part of the almshouses' site, presumably by
Douglas, by 1880. (fn. 201)

Apart from Bute Street, which had been laid
out in the 1840's (see page 17), the development
of the triangular area bounded by Reece Mews
Harrington Road and Old Brompton Road
followed shortly after the building of the Metropolitan
and Metropolitan District Railways. The
decision to form a wide street (the present
Harrington Road) over the tunnel carrying the
railway lines in continuation of the southern arm
of Stanhope Gardens (then called Harrington
Road) was made by (Sir) John Fowler, who was
engineer to both companies, in order to provide
better access to the new South Kensington
Station. At the same time, and for the same
reason, Exhibition Road was extended c. 1867
southwards to the present Thurloe Street. (fn. 340)

In 1874 the railway companies sold the land
on each side of Harrington Road, which was now
surplus to their requirements, to various builders.
William Douglas secured all of that lying on the
north side. (fn. 341) For the most part this was only a
narrow strip which he was able to add to land he
purchased from the 1851 Commissioners in the
same year to provide a usable frontage to the new
road. (fn. 342) Although he began building houses and
shops here almost at once, (fn. 201) the development of
the north side of Harrington Road extended into
the late 1880's.

On the south side, the land between Reece
Mews and the backs of houses in Bute Street,
extending southwards as far as Old Brompton
Road, was sold to Matthew Scott of Earl's Court
Gardens, builder. (fn. 343) He, in turn, sold a small piece
of land to Freake to enable the latter to build the
east side of Reece Mews. (fn. 344) Scott built houses in
Harrington Road (now demolished), stables in
Kendrick Mews and the grim terrace with
ground-floor shops now numbered 48–60 (even)
Old Brompton Road (Plate 81c), which, in 1875,
replaced the mid-eighteenth-century Prospect
Place. (fn. 201)

To the east of Bute Street several builders were
involved. John Cawley of Kilburn built the west
side of Glendower Place, (fn. 345) while the remaining
sites were divided between George and Joshua
Gregory of Paddington, Thomas Thompson and
Thomas Smith, also of Paddington, George
Stevens of Notting Hill and George Colls of
Bayswater. (fn. 346) The initial development of this
small area took place quite rapidly after 1874 (fn. 201)
but there has been some redevelopment since.

Save for the southern end of Queen's Gate
(where the house-styles follow the grand,
stuccoed manner established further north, Plate
118b) and St. Augustine's Church and Vicarage
(see pages 349–53), there is virtually nothing of
note in the area. The north side of Harrington
Road near Queen's Gate is perhaps a partial
exception. The former Queen's Gate Hall, now
a Christian Science church, is at least curious both
at front and back, with an obscure buildinghistory
probably dating from c. 1881–6. (fn. 347) The
hall itself, whose meagre 'Gothic' windows can be
seen from Queensberry Mews West, has no
frontage to Harrington Road and is approached
(like some eighteenth-century theatre) through
the ground and first floors of the house at No. 42
Harrington Road (Plate 101e; fig. 61). This,
however, is in an idiosyncratic red-brick-andstone
domestic Baroque style formerly represented
also in houses built at Nos. 12–26 Harrington
Road by William Douglas, the original freehold
owner of the hall site. No. 42, like the hall
behind, blocks what had been intended as an
entrance to Queensberry Mews West, which
accounts for the splayed corners of the slightly
earlier flanking houses at Nos. 40 and 44. (fn. 348)
Inside, the entrance hall and staircase are mainly
R. A. Briggs's work of c. 1889, executed by
Douglas's son John, and the single-storeyed stone
street-front, though different from Briggs's drawing
of that year, may be largely his work. (fn. 349)
Between Nos. 40 and 42 are the vestiges of an
external liftshaft of ornamental iron and glass
added in 1897 by J. A. J. Keynes, architect, for
use by a photographer's patrons. (fn. 350) Westward,
Nos. 44 and 46 appear to have suffered the
unusual misfortune of a collision.

Apart from Nos. 48–60 Old Brompton Road
the houses erected here in the 1870's are mostly
sad representatives of the last phase of the
Italianate tradition, especially those with groundfloor
shops, for which the most debased varieties
of that style appear to have been especially
reserved, while later piecemeal redevelopment
has added little of interest.

Although many of the buildings consisted of
ground-floor shops with living accommodation
above, there were also several terraces of houses
with their own porches and bay windows on the
ground floor. Difficulties seem to have been
encountered in disposing of these and in 1894 a
valuation report on three houses at the corner of
Glendower Place and Harrington Road stated
that if they were put up for sale it was unlikely
that any buyers would be forthcoming. (fn. 351) Many
became hotels or boarding houses within a few
years of building, and by the beginning of this
century others were converted into, or replaced
by, blocks of flats. The tendency towards the
proliferation of hotels, which is now one characteristic
of the area, began at an early date. The
present Egerton Court, Nos. 2–12 (even) Old
Brompton Road, was built as an hotel, the 'Princes Gate Hotel', in 1874
(J. G. Hall of Hammersmith, architect), (fn. 352)and the
erection of the Norfolk Hotel on the north side of
Harrington Road in 1888–90 (W. H. Scrymgour, architect) (fn. 353) brought the
larger establishment to the area. More typical,
however, were the hotels formed by joining
terrace houses together.

Figure 61:

Queensberry Mews West, view looking south to rear of former Queen's Gate Hall

A more successful development had meanwhile
taken place in Exhibition Road.

Freake in Exhibition Road

Until the building of the Mormon church in c.
1960–1 a terrace of nine houses numbered 64–72
(consec.) Princes Gate, extended between the
entrance to Princes Gate Mews and the Huxley
Building on the east side of Exhibition Road
(Plate 58a). Four of them, Nos. 69–72, remain.
The nine were built by Freake on freehold land
that he acquired in two pieces. Originally it
formed part of the 1851 Commissioners' estate,
but, as has been seen, the northern part, including
the site of Nos. 64–69 and of Princes Gate Mews,
was taken by Freake in 1856 in exchange for other
land (see page 57) and the southern part,
including the site of Nos. 70–72, was acquired
from the Science and Art Department in 1865
(see page 294 and fig. 18 on page 53). Freake
first used the land for the spacious layout of
Princes Gate Mews in 1859 (Plate 2b). The
houses came later and first appear in the Post
Office Directory between 1868 and 1872. They
continued (with Nos. 59–63, occupied in 1867–73) the sequence of Freake's houses down
Exhibition Road (but numbered in Princes Gate)
and clockwise round Princes Gardens, that were
already in occupation. The first residents included
Viscount Bury, Lady Clinton and Lord Methuen.
Lord Acton appears at the still surviving No. 72
from 1877 to 1890 (fn. 50) (and on moving in seems to
have wanted Sir Henry Cole to obtain access for
him through the Museum grounds as a short cut
to Brompton Oratory (fn. 354)). Joseph Chamberlain
was his tenant here for a year or two c. 1880–2. (fn. 355)
Like most of Freake's undertakings these houses
were a success, at least in the eyes of their
occupants, who did not very readily move out of
them (see page 319).

In contrast, the last development of the 'stucco
classic' mode to be noted, on the 1851 Commissioners'
estate at the north-east end of Queen's
Gate, shows this tradition of house-building
becoming untenable.

The year 1872 was in some ways the heyday of
old 'South Kensington', with its central garden
and array of great new display-buildings; and the
big private houses had, after a lull, been rapidly
filling again. In circumstances indicated on page
67 the Commissioners decided to lease part of
their main rectangle for building, and by 1874
had agreed to dispose of all of the east side of
Queen's Gate north of the present site of Prince
Consort Road (plans b, c between pages 54–5).
They obtained extremely high ground rents
averaging some £2,000 per annum per acre.

At the corner of Queen's Gate and Kensington
Gore a site of less than a quarter of an acre was, in
the summer of 1873, informally agreed to be let
for £745 per annum to E. L. Samuel, a Liverpool
banker, who had two houses built here, No. 200
Queen's Gate and No. 25 Kensington Gore
(Plate 92c, 92d, 92e). (fn. 356) The latter was intended for
his own occupation. The builders of these oldfashioned-looking
houses were Thorne and
Company of Chelsea, (fn. 201) and the architect the
rather elderly S. W. Daukes (1811–80), who had
successfully used various styles in the 1840's, in
Gloucestershire and elsewhere. (fn. 357) He submitted
his plans to the Metropolitan Board of Works in
1873 on behalf of Hunt, Stephenson and Jones,
the firm of surveyors headed by the Commissioners'
own surveyor, Sir Henry Hunt. (fn. 358)
What bearing this has on the choice of Daukes
is obscure, but an imprimatur of some kind by
Hunt seems implied. Not everybody approved
(see page 67).

The corner house, No. 25 Kensington Gore
(now the Yugoslav Embassy), which in Daukes's
design had its corner turret finished by a dome
that probably remained unbuilt, (fn. 359) was leased in
1875 to Samuel and occupied by him until his
death in 1877. (fn. 360) His widow assigned it in 1878
to Sir Albert Sassoon, who lived here until his
death in 1896. (fn. 361) In aid of his conspicuous
hospitality he had internal and external alterations
made in 1878 by J. Macvicar Anderson (and
other alterations later). (fn. 362) The library disappeared
and the dining-room grew larger, being, rather
aptly, fitted up with Messrs. Gillow's Jacobean
woodwork from the Prince of Wales's pavilion
at the 1878 Paris Exhibition. (fn. 363) Much of the
elaborate interior survives.

East of No. 25 Samuel had agreed to build on
the sites of Nos. 23 and 24, perhaps meaning to
extend the style of No. 25 to another domed
corner turret, but did not do so. (fn. 364)(fn. 17)

No. 200 Queen's Gate was leased to its first
occupant after Samuel's death, in 1879. (fn. 366) Nos.
197–199 (consec.) were built in 1874 by George
Trollope and Sons: in 1875 Trollopes themselves
took the leases of Nos. 197 and 199, and the first
occupant of No. 198 the lease of that site. (fn. 367) The
stylistic uniformity with No. 200 seems to show
that Daukes was the architect (Plate 98a). In
plan his houses followed established precedent.

At No. 196 Queen's Gate a very different
house was building to Norman Shaw's design
(see page 331), but whether forward- or backward-looking
architecturally all these sites were
soon occupied.

Nos. 186–195 (consec.) were agreed for in
1873 by Sir Henry Hunt's old bête noire William
Douglas (then about to buy the freehold reversion
of his first holding from the Commissioners), but
Douglas was perhaps just a little slower to build,
and had very different success. He had been
joined in the business by his eldest son, also
William, and was probably about to retire when
in 1876 his son died, aged only about thirty-two.
Obliged to continue in business William Douglas
senior never really succeeded in adapting himself
to the changing requirements of the time. (fn. 368) He
received leases of Nos. 186–188 Queen's Gate at
the southern end of his plot, south of the newly
laid out Bremner Road, in 1876, and then,
evidently building southward from No. 196,
received leases of Nos. 195 to 189 between 1877
and 1880 (Plate 88b). (fn. 369) Douglas was then, as he
afterwards claimed, 'a very wealthy man'. (fn. 370) He
employed on these houses, which he named
Albert Gotha Mansions, the architect R. A.
Lewcock of Stoke Newington, later a publichouse
practitioner. Lewcock used a plan of the
standard type for each house, varied only at the
corner sites (figs. 87–88 on page 327). The fronts,
originally canopied at first floor, were given more
plasticity than earlier and the skyline rather more
animation (fig. 62, house on left). But although
less conservative than Daukes's houses their stucco
dressing made these seem still to be essentially the
same terrace houses as before, and they evidently
just missed their market. By that time The Building
News was damning 'the dismal and insufferable
barrack-like monotony that pervades these
parts', (fn. 371) and, whether or not for that reason,
Douglas had the utmost difficulty in disposing of
the houses. This was perhaps increased by their
greater proximity than Nos. 196–200 to the
Exhibitions held in 1883–6 in the Horticultural
Society's garden. (fn. 370) Nos. 186–188 had to be
turned into flats in 1888 and Douglas's other
houses only filled up between 1892 and 1898, after
some, like Nos. 191 and 192, had actually been
refaced and otherwise altered to make them
acceptable (see page 342 and fig. 62).

In 1888 Douglas, described as builder, contractor,
and furnished house proprietor, was
adjudicated bankrupt. (fn. 372) He was then working as
a builder also in Chelsea (Lots Road, Elystan
Street and Sprimont Place), and living, he said, at a
rate of £1,000 to £1,200 per annum; this was in
his house at Barnes with a music room, and
employing a coachman apiece for himself and his
wife. (fn. 373) One of the two trustees appointed to
administer his estate was an obscure architect
Richard Tomlinson who, if himself a creditor,
may be conjectured to have supplied Douglas with
some of his designs. (The creditors, it was said,
'heartily sympathized' with Douglas: in the end
their best prospect was 6d. to 1s. in the £.)

The Official Receiver accepted that Douglas
kept the books usual in the building trade but
Douglas said that he maintained no running profit
and loss account. 'From time to time he drew
conclusions in his own mind as to the value of his
property, but there was no formal balance sheet
made out.' Douglas attributed his failure simply
to the depreciation in the value of his house
property from about 1878, and the burden of his
mortgage payments. 'The bankrupt said that last
year he had a successful year, but the year before
he had no sales, and his bills becoming due, some
confusion occurred which brought on the disaster.'
Even so, and although it was said that his principal
creditors had had long business relations with him,
it seems necessary to postulate some desperate
eleventh-hour borrowing to explain the growth
of his liabilities to the total of £657,156.

William Douglas died in 1893. But the family
connexion with Kensington continued. His son,
John Douglas (1862–1928), took over the
builder's yard in Chelsea, and set up an office in
1888 at No. 12 Exhibition Road, where a
builder's and estate agent's business was carried on
under his name until 1939. (fn. 374) He built some of
the last residences in Queen's Gate and was, in
fact, the contractor employed to reface and alter
some of his father's houses. He became a Kensington
Borough Councillor, as did his own son,
Quentin, who was Mayor in 1952–3.

Money

On the occasion of William Douglas's bankruptcy
the Official Receiver reported that the builder's
perfectly usual book-keeping 'did not sufficiently
disclose his business transactions and financial
position'. (fn. 370) In no case has it in fact been possible
to ascertain much about the real financial or
economic history of the builders passed in review
above. Perhaps Douglas merely continued in his
trade too long, into the period of overbuilding
large houses in this part of London already noticed
in the Estates Gazette in 1878. (fn. 375) The extreme
disparity in the builders' fortunes is striking. Back
in 1859 The Building News had celebrated 'the
fearless speculative energy' of Freake, Jackson
and Aldin, (fn. 376) and the unlovely streets they built
are a monument at least to nerve, grit and resilience.

Figure 62:

Nos. 191–193 (consec.) Queen's Gate

Perhaps if Aldin had lived he would have put
up a public building at cost price, and become a
baronet. As it was, it was only Freake who
attained the heights more commonly reserved for
public-works contractors like Kelk and Lucas.

The ground landlords' rewards can be partially
assessed by the sum of their ground rents, remembering,
however, that these or the freehold
reversions were being sold off piecemeal and, on
the 1851 Commissioners' estate at least, from an
early period. Excluding the Commissioners' main
rectangle, the four chief landowners (the Commissioners
themselves, the Earls of Harrington,
the Alexander family and Mills' Charity) received,
by agreements concluded between 1852 and 1870,
£11,500 per annum in ground rents for some sixty
acres, or about £191 per annum per acre. The
Commissioners obtained a much better rent than
anyone, averaging £400 per annum per acre (and,
on their main rectangle, much more still). The
Alexander family received on average £182, Mills'
Charity £166 and Lord Harrington £100.

At the rule-of-thumb factor of thirty-one years'
purchase of ground rents, these sixty acres outside
the rectangle acquired, by the process of leasing
them for ninety-nine years, a nominal capital
value of, perhaps, £356,500 or some £5,940 per
acre. On the Commissioners' estate, the land
acquired by freehold purchases had cost on
average some £3,100 per acre, and by the same
rule of thumb the part outside the rectangle
acquired a nominal value of some £12,400 per
acre.

The cost of building only a very few of these
670 houses or so can be known even conjecturally.
The successful contractors' tender for Nos. 1–9
Queen's Gate Terrace in 1862 averaged £2,283
each, and that for Nos. 1–18 Stanhope Gardens
in 1865 averaged £2,933: the five Queen's Gate
Terrace houses seem to have averaged £3,100 for
final cost when finished. These houses, especially
in Stanhope Gardens, were comparatively moderate-sized.
The surveyor for prospective mortgagees
in 1866 thought Nos. 68–87 Queen's
Gate would cost about £3,000 to build. Richardson
thought Jackson's houses at Nos. 1–19
Queen's Gate cost between £4,000 and £5,000
each or a little less, 'allowing him his 25 per cent.'
(The significance of the gloss is not clear as
Jackson was, of course, not working there by
contract but as the building lessee.) (fn. 377) Less
disinterestedly, Spicer said in 1867 that his
Cromwell Road houses had cost him £5,000 each
and two of his Cromwell Gardens houses £8,000
each. Nos. 47–52 Queen's Gate seem to have cost
about £7,100 each to finish from a little over
ground level.

The selling prices, of course, varied with the
nature of the interest sold but some figures indicate
their range. Various long leases of normal
houses in Queen's Gate and Queen's Gate Place
in the 1860's were sold at 'improved' ground rents
for between £4,500 and £5,500, or were
estimated by mortgagees at this value. But some
£7,740 was obtained for a Queen's Gate house
with a coach-house at the rear at its original
ground rent in 1859, Freake's big houses in
Cromwell Road sold for £9,500–£11,000, and
Whatman at least asked similar prices for his
'Albert Houses' in Queen's Gate. Not disinterestedly, Richardson said in 1869 that Aldin had
sold two houses in the same road for £14,500 and
£16,000.

On the other hand by 1894 the value of three
houses in Harrington Road was down to little
more than £2,800 each, (fn. 378) and other instances
occur of an apparently real decline in the value of
the standard South Kensington house by the
nineties.

The sources of the builders' capital cannot be
quantified comparatively. Institutional lenders
such as banks and insurance companies were
obviously important, but so also were private
individuals. As elsewhere, the solicitor played an
important role, like G. J. Mayhew who advanced
'thousand of pounds' to Aldin. (fn. 379) Sometimes the
solicitor was channelling loan capital from various
sources among his clients, but not always.

Footnotes

1. Throughout this chapter reference should be made to plans B, C in the end pocket.

2. No. 25 was rebuilt in a red-brick Arts-and-Crafts manner as two-roomed flats or 'pieds-à-terre' in 1911 by an architect,
W. F. Harber, who was evidently related to one of the then owners 50.
No. 26A, facing Queen's Gate Terrace, was given its suburban appearance by the alteration of back premises of No. 26
in 1926 by A. M. Cawthorne. 51

3. Ten years later a James Matthews, architect, appears in a directory but working only in Aberdeen. 55

4. At the back of No. 49 Gloucester Road (Sir) Edwin Lutyens added in 1903 for Adam Black a music-room which is an
early example of his neo-Georgian. 103 It was spoilt in 1970 by the addition of an upper storey to convert it into a separate
dwelling entered from Petersham Mews.

5. E. J. James, M.P. and Q.C., had emigrated to New York in 1861 'for personal protection', after being disbarred because
of unprofessional conduct, the first Q.C. to obtain 'this infamous pre-eminence'. 146

6. The jump in the numbering of Queen's Gate from 41 to 44 presumably arose from the opening of Elvaston Place
into Queen's Gate after the number of 44 was established.

7. Stone was supplied to Richardson by Messrs. Freeman of Millbank and iron by Holbrooke and Company of Chelsea. 160

8. Nos. 35–36 Thurloe Place, first occupied by 1865 by an ironmonger and a corn-and-coal merchant, were in 1954
converted by Sir Hugh Casson and Neville Conder into their own offices. The sculpture over the entrance by Lady Casson
was commissioned as their sign by the previous occupants, the architectural model-makers Cockade.

9. On the other hand, the story is told that Freake had a robust Cockney accent, whereas his wife spoke genteel English;
but such was the force of his personality that it was the lady who acquired her spouse's accent.

10. The painter, Sir John Lavery, is commemorated by a plaque at No. 5, where he lived from 1899 to 1940.

11. Freake took advantage of the Exhibition to run up a very big wooden flag-bedecked building on the east side of
Exhibition Road and west side of Princes Gardens to house an 'International Bazaar' decorated by Delessert and Company
of Paris, with a 'frontispiece at the entrance . . . boldly painted in a very French style' (just visible on Plate ).

12. Alfred Waterhouse may have taken No. 5 in 1864 as his office for some years, 233 during which he was preparing his
first designs for the Natural History Museum opposite, but in the Post Office Directory he appears only in New Street, Spring
Gardens (1865) and New Cavendish Street (1866 onwards).

13. The still surviving No. 52A Cromwell Road appears not to have been built in its present form before 1910. 33

14. Nos. 65–67 (consec.) Queen's Gate and No. 52 Cromwell Road have been replaced by Baden Powell House, built in
1959–61 to the designs of Ralph Tubbs, .
It was probably for this part of the Harrington estate north of Cromwell Road that C. J. Richardson designed a large
single-storey 'refreshment room' at the time of the 1862 Exhibition. Fortunately this rather dreadful building remained
unexecuted. 294

15. The east side of Stanhope Gardens and the west side of Stanhope Mews East were rebuilt in 1958–60 to the designs of
Guy Morgan and Partners, who were successful in a competition in which the ground landlord, the eleventh Earl of
Harrington, was one of the adjudicators.

16. No. 57B Cromwell Road (Stanhope Cottage), at the rear of No. 68 Queen's Gate, was rebuilt in 1921–2, evidently to
the designs of Charles Saunders and Sons, surveyors. 303

17. No. 23 was probably built for an insurance broker before 1893, perhaps by H. H. Bridgman and S. G. Goss, architects.348
No. 24 may never have been rebuilt, and still retained in 1974 the ghost of its Georgian appearance beneath the stucco.